A Living Faith

With my mother and three siblings

This past Sunday I preached in the church that raised me, where I not only went to Sunday School but also preached my first sermon; The Hawley United Methodist Church. The readings can be found here; I preached on the epistle reading, from James.

I have lived in New England (if you count Connecticut as New England) for more than three decades, with a native New Englander as my life-partner. And we have lived in Worcester County, Massachusetts (in the heart of New England) for the past 25 years. I am a proud Red Sox and Patriots fan, much to my brother’s chagrin.

Even so, as my father would say, you can take the boy out of Hawley but you can’t take Hawley out of the boy. It’s good to be home this weekend. It’s been good to celebrate my Uncle Jim’s life yesterday with family, two years after his death. It has been good to see my dad’s name on a new sign across town at the basketball courts.

With my sons at the courts named for my dad

I grew up in this Church. It formed my life in Christ in ways for which I will always be profoundly grateful. Until I went off to college in 1981, the Rev. Gail Wintermute was my pastor and his wife, Milly, was my piano teacher. It was Milly Wintermute who first suggested that I might make a better pastor than pianist.

I laughed (too) but for a different reason: because I knew that I was going to be a lawyer and then go into the family business: politics. As they say, “we make plans and God laughs.” God has a good sense of humor and usually the joke is on us.

If it’s true that everything we need to know we learned in Kindergarten then it may also be true that everything we need to know about our faith, we learned in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. I am indebted to this congregation generally and to Katharine Bates in particular for laying the foundation for all the formal academic theological studies I would take on later in life.

I went to seminary at Drew and I was ordained in the United Methodist Church in what was then called the Wyoming Annual Conference. I preached my first sermon here, in this space. So thank you all – both the living and the dead who have made the Hawley United Methodist Church alive with the saints of God.

Twenty-eight years ago I left the United Methodist Church to become an Episcopal priest. There were no hard feelings on my side of things. I just came to feel that I would continue to grow in that part of the Body of Christ that formed the Wesley boys. As I came to understand it, both meant to make the Anglican Church better, not start a new denomination. And so I feel, to this day, grateful to John and Charles Wesley as people who shaped my theology and faith as surely as Gail and Katharine and Edgar Singer and Marty Cox and so many others here as well. They are all among that great cloud of witnesses for me. Every time I sing a Charles Wesley hymn from The Episcopal Hymnal I say a silent prayer of gratitude for this congregation.

Methodists and Episcopalians are very close cousins and over the years Marty and I both prayed hard that we’d find ways to deepen the bonds of affection and recognize how similar we are deep down. I don’t know when or if that will all happen. But I do know that we are one in Christ, and I do know that I’m grateful to be here today.

When first asked by Michelle to cover for her today, I figured on this Labor Day weekend I might reflect on work: on our vocation to love God and neighbor in our daily lives. And she gave me free reign to do that. But she also told me she’d be in the midst of a sermon series, “Take a Look in the Mirror,” on the readings from James that come up between now and the end of September. I didn’t want to mess with her series and so I told her that James was just fine with me. And it is. So let’s get on with the work at hand…

Let’s stay with John Wesley a bit. There is a story told about him that goes like this: a preacher friend of his, Samuel Bradburn, found himself in rather desperate financial straits. When Wesley heard about this he sent him a five-pound note with the following letter: Dear Sammy, “Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land and verily thou shalt be fed.” Yours affectionately, John

Wesley is quoting Scripture – Psalm 37:3 to be precise. But he makes it real by including the money for his friend to in fact be well fed, at least for a day or two. Wesley doesn’t just say, “thoughts and prayers, buddy.” He connects Scripture with action. If he’d just sent a nice note with a nice verse from Scripture but without the five pound note it would be a different story. Instead, Wesley connects love of neighbor with a practical tangible sharing. That’s my sermon today. That’s it. I am going to talk a while longer because people expect longer sermons in the United Methodist Church than in the Episcopal Church, I’ve found. But if someone asks you what the sermon today was about – if Michelle asks you when she returns, that is it. Tell her I stuck with James. And that thoughts and prayers are not enough. That love of neighbor means being not just hearers of the Word but doers.

There is a line in a prayer from Iona – an ecumenical community in Scotland – that concludes with these words:

Lord hear our prayers, and if today we might be the means by which you answer the prayers of others, then may you find us neither deaf nor defiant, but keen to fulfill your purpose, for Jesus sake. Amen.

When we pray for somebody, we aren’t just asking God to fix something. We are offering ourselves as living sacrifices to God. When we pray for someone who is sick, God may be saying to us, they could really use a note, or a card, or a casserole, or a visit from you. May we be neither deaf nor defiant when God responds to our prayers in this way. May we respond: send me.

This story repeats over and over again in the Bible. One of the early examples is Moses. Remember that a new Pharaoh had arisen who did not know Joseph, and as a result the Hebrew people were now slaves. Pharaoh had no qualms about violating fair labor practices – that’s worth remembering this weekend. (And you see what I did there, right, sneaking in a little Labor Day material?!)

So God’s people kept on praying that God would notice the injustices they were facing and do something about it. Working seven days a week was still not enough to live a decent life in Egypt. So they cry out to God. And God says to Moses at the burning bush: “I’ve heard! I’ve seen! And now I’m sending you to go tell old Pharaoh, let my people go.”

God means, in prayer, to turn our hearts and to get our attention. This is the great misunderstanding about prayer, I think. We think we are calling God’s attention to something God hasn’t got a clue about already: our sick cousin, our troubled marriage, our unemployed sister, the pain in Afghanistan. But we pray so that God can melt us and mold us and fill us and use us to make the neighborhood a better place. Thoughts and prayers are never enough. God has given us work to do.  

Lord hear our prayers, and if today we might be the means by which you answer the prayers of others, then may you find us neither deaf nor defiant, but keen to fulfill your purpose, for Jesus sake. Amen.

So, it’s good from time to time to spend a little time with the Epistle of James and I commend your pastor for doing just that. The first part of our reading today is pretty self-explanatory and you don’t need a preacher or teacher to say much. If you are an usher or on the greeting committee or serve on the Council or sing in the choir or even if you are just a regular parishioner, don’t treat people differently based on who is rich and who is poor, or on who is well-dressed and who is wearing hand-me-downs. You don’t need a preacher to interpret what that means! You just need to look in the mirror!

Even so, it’s hard to do because it’s easier to gravitate toward those who look like us, and most of you seem to be the well-dressed types who, even if not the 1%, are doing ok.

A Canon to the Ordinary is basically what Methodists would call a District Superintendent. I work for the bishop and in this position which I’ve held for the past eight and a half years, I’m in a different congregation every Sunday. We have fifty-one of them. So I get that broad view now which is different from what I did as a parish priest in Holden for fifteen years. Some congregations have worked really hard to welcome new folks in and some have work to do.

But I’ll be honest, almost none of them struggle to understand this reading from James today. It’s not that complicated. What’s hard is to live it. And denial is not just a river in Egypt. They all think they are about the friendliest congregations in Christendom. And f you are straight and white and have a couple of young kids and you walk into most of our congregations in the central and western parts of Massachusetts you will be pounced on. This is what people prayed for! Are you interested in teaching Sunday School by any chance?

But if you come to church alone or if you are a person of color, or LGBT, or are not wearing the right clothes, you may not be noticed. It may feel like you are wearing an invisibility cloak. Or worse even than that, you might catch a hostile glance: what are you doing here? My job isn’t to scold those congregations, even when I’m tempted to. It’s to try to hold up a mirror. It’s to try to call them to live their own stated values. It’s to try to call them to a more vibrant, living faith.

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.

That brings me back to good old John Wesley, sending his friend a word of encouragement. But also five bucks to buy some lunch. We all know about Wesley’s strangely warmed heart at Aldersgate but that is not an end in itself: a softer, warmer heart (rather than a cold hard one) led Wesley and his followers out to the coal mines at a time when the Church of England was not paying much attention to those folks. Wesley had been educated at Oxford; I’m sure he didn’t have much in common with those coal miners. But he knew that his strangely warmed heart meant nothing if he didn’t let it lead him into the world to serve his neighbor.

My friends in Christ: I cannot confess your sins. And you can’t confess mine. It may well be easier to know what a terrible Christian so and so three pews over is, but it doesn’t work like that. This whole idea of looking in the mirror is that there is only one person we can change. And this whole idea of a congregation looking in the mirror is that we don’t need to spend much time worrying about how they are living the gospel at Cole Memorial Baptist or Queen of Peace Roman Catholic Church or across the street at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church where I was baptized fifty-eight years ago. This congregation is called to do your part in this branch of the Jesus Movement. Always with God’s help.

The problems of this world are daunting. There is a lot of wisdom in learning “to let Go and let God” because, my friends in Christ – we are not called to be God. That job is taken. We do not need to fix the world. But we are called to seek and serve Christ in the world and then do our small part to mend what is broken, trusting the Holy Spirit to raise up other laborers for the vineyard. You cannot say you have faith and no works. That’s not faith. It’s dead.

So when you “take it to the Lord in prayer” be sure that you also listen for God’s response.

Lord hear our prayers, and if today we might be the means by which you answer the prayers of others, then may you find us neither deaf nor defiant, but keen to fulfill your purpose, for Jesus sake. Amen.