Faith Without Works is Dead

24 August 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION

“Today is a day the Lord has made,” says an old religious writer, “let us therefore rejoice and be glad in it.” It is indeed!

It is so good to be together again!

For it is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this: let us begin it together in song.

PRAYER

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think.

Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships that might, with our help, expand our souls and our worlds.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us toward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

SERMON

I hardly ever do sermons on old theological arguments – especially on topics as arcane as whether we are saved by faith alone, or whether we’re to be judged by our works as well as by our words. It really is an old argument, in both Eastern and Western religion. Eastern religions are pretty clear that your deeds determine your karma, and the kind of reincarnation you’re likely to have. They usually don’t give a lot of credit for just thinking good thoughts.

Judaism has always taught that the two great commandments are to love God with heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those teachings didn’t originate with Jesus. He learned them as a Jew. Even on their day of atonement, which they celebrate on September 15th this year, it is made clear that in order to make atonement with God, you must first make peace with those friends and neighbors you have wronged.

And Catholicism has also taught that it takes both faith and good works – plus a little grace – to be saved, and that the grace is most likely to come to those who have done good works. All of these teachings came from times when the vast majority of people were illiterate, and almost all teaching was done through stories passed down from generation to generation.

But after the printing press was invented and people began reading, things changed. Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation nearly 500 years ago by teaching that we are saved by faith alone. We need to read the book, to know what we believe, and we are saved by faith alone without the necessity of doing the good works to earn it, he taught.

I’ve always thought Luther was dead wrong there. But since I’m one of those people who likes to read and think, I’ve also always hoped he might be right. It’s easy for me to slip into believing in salvation by bibliography. Like if I can just get all the footnotes in the right places, I’ll be ok.

Luckily, when I get that far gone, I usually wake up, or whomever I’m talking to will roll their eyes or doze off. Then I snap out of it and remember, again, that life is both bigger and better than books – even my books.

But I’m not alone here. Everywhere, I think, in all times and places, those who love to think about things have always been in danger of falling off of the world. It’s the special curse of intellectuals.

One of our oldest Western stories is about an early Greek philosopher who was walking around one day, head in the clouds, staring at the sky, when he fell into a well. For centuries afterwards, the Greeks told this story about those who think too much: people whose heads were so full of the heavens that they were of no earthly use.

It’s the same story we still tell about absent-minded professors, who forget where they left their hat or parked the car, or who drive to school without their shoes on.

We think over here, the world’s over there, and we lose touch with it as we get seduced by our thoughts. You know what I’m talking about!

It’s the story of thinking rather than doing, faith rather than works. It comes out again and again in some of the jokes about intellectuals.

A friend who taught undergraduate philosophy courses told me that every year, her students’ very favorite story was the one she told about another great intellectual, the French philosopher Rene Descartes, whose most famous line was “I think, therefore I am.”

One night, Descartes went to a fine restaurant, and each time the waiter suggested another course, Descartes ordered it until he was so full he could hardly move. When the waiter returned to ask if he would like to order dessert, Descartes said “I think not” – and he disappeared.

Sometimes I think that’s the abiding fear of people who think too much. We’re afraid that if we stop thinking we’ll disappear. As though thinking were enough. As though faith is enough, as though it isn’t really necessary to spend time in the world after all. We tend to follow Martin Luther’s goofy idea in this, whether we’ve ever been inside a Lutheran church or not. This tendency to over-intellectualize shows in some of the best jokes about Unitarians, too.

I’m remembering a famous scene from the television series “Welcome Back, Kotter” from twenty or thirty years ago. Someone had been hurt, or was lying unconscious. One person shouted “Get him a priest!” Another said “He’s a Unitarian.” “Oh,” said the first, “then find him a math teacher!”

And the great joke about what you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness: Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason. In a perverse sort of way, I think we like these stories, because they imply that we’re smarter than the average armadillo, and we like thinking that religion is about being smarter, rather than being more whole and authentic.

But there’s another side to these jokes, another side to the idea that just faith, just thinking, is enough to make a religion or a life out of, and it isn’t always funny. Maybe you’ve had the experience of running into someone who didn’t live in their head, and whose down-to-earth style brought you up short, and made you question the incompleteness of your intellectualizing. I certainly have, and I love these experiences, because they always teach me something and help me grow.

About a year ago I had a sobering experience in this area. I was preaching in Fort Worth, and went a couple days early to have some time with my colleague Diana and her sister Georgia’s family. We were guests at Georgia’s home in Ponder, Texas. Ponder is a small town (about 450) north of Fort Worth, known for a great Texas restaurant (The Ranchman’s), and the bank that “Bonnie and Clyde” robbed in the movie of thirty years ago. (They also have a great bumper sticker that just says “Ponder, Texas – Just Think About It!”) Georgia owns the bank, it’s where I sleep when I visit.

We were all sitting and rocking on Georgia’s front porch – it’s what you do in Ponder – and Diana and I were heavy into talking about work: how to talk to Unitarian churches about giving money to the church, since we were both getting ready for our church’s annual pledge drive.

Georgia belongs to a fundamentalist Baptist church, I think it’s in the holiness movement. Diana and I had been talking for about ten minutes when we realized we had left Georgia completely out of the conversation, and were ignoring her on her own front porch. Diana said something about not meaning to be rude, but thought Georgia probably wasn’t very interested in this topic.

Georgia allowed as how she had been listening in, but was very confused. “I just can’t imagine having to plan tactics to talk to people about supporting the church,” she said. “Each week when I go to church, I put a $100 bill in the collection plate. If I don’t have money that week then I don’t, but usually I do. I figure if we don’t support it, who will?” I don’t mean to be offensive here, but I honestly don’t understand how ministers could be confused about this!”

Georgia’s little church has sent their youth to Montana for a summer to help Blackfoot Indians clean and repair the homes on their reservations. They’ve done this for years, the church pays for it. They’ve also paid to send youth into Mexico for two or three weeks at a time to do the same for needy people there. And one of Georgia’s daughters has had two trips to Thailand, where she spent two months teaching English to Thai adults. She went back again this summer. Thailand is 95% Theravada Buddhist, about 4% Muslim, less than 1% Christian. When I asked her daughter if she thought there was much chance of converting the Thais to Christianity, she seemed shocked and said no, they’re pretty happy being Buddhists. “Why are you doing it?” I asked. “In our church,” she said, “we were taught to serve, because faith without works is dead. Isn’t that what you teach at your church?” I lied, convincing myself that it was really just a “little white lie.”

To me, it was astounding that a little Baptist church could do such far-ranging good works. I don’t know what percentage of her pay Georgia is giving to her church, but it must be 15-20% or more. And she isn’t doing it because she’s scared of hell. Georgia isn’t scared of anything! She’s doing it because she can’t imagine ever doing otherwise. She’s doing it because she really believes that faith without works is dead, and that a religion without a spontaneously generous heart is a contradiction in terms.

I wasn’t raised that way. The Presbyterian churches of my youth never taught us to serve like that, and we never discussed money in church. We weren’t taught to believe we could make a positive difference in the lives of Indians in Montana, or strangers in Mexico, or in Thailand. I never belonged to a church that routinely sent its youth to other states and countries to lend a helping hand to people they have never met. In the churches I grew up in, we weren’t taught how to have generous hearts that open out to ourselves and others. So it’s something I had to grow into as an adult.

Why is this so hard for liberals when it seems so easy for Georgia’s church and other conservative churches? I think it’s because there’s an assumption in a religion just of faith, or thinking, that we haven’t examined, an assumption which is false. There’s a lot more to religion than just thinking or having discussion groups.

Liberal religion often acts like it’s only for adults, like people are already finished by the time they arrive, like their character is already formed, and all they need to do is discuss interesting ideas. Salvation by faith, salvation by thinking, we think therefore we are. But that’s not true. We’re not finished. We come to church partly to get finished, to learn and experience more of the activities and involvements that can make us more complete people.

A healthy church is the best place we have to develop a whole range of sensitivities and skills that make us more complete people. And while faith – thinking – plays an important part, it doesn’t play the biggest part. The biggest part of becoming whole comes from doing, from works.

Faith without works, thinking without doing and being, are dead because they can’t give us the depth and breadth of life we need. The form of today’s service was unusual because its real message came in the prayer. The sermon was designed to flesh out the prayer. Now see if this morning’s prayer makes a different kind of sense to you: