My dad had a plaque on the wall by his work bench that said, “Work fascinates me.  I can sit and look at it for hours.”  I don’t know who came up with that line, but it wasn’t James!  He was pretty heavy duty into DOING WORK, not just thinking about it.  He was undoubtedly shaped by the ethic if his Jewish upbringing, which emphasized tikkun olan—doing good works to repair the world.  What is pure religion?  He writes in James 1:27, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this:  to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep yourself from being polluted by the world.”

James grew up with a faith that taught him to care for people in need.  This is a contrast to what the world teaches, which is basically to care only about ourselves.  The earliest Christian converts were likely influenced by Greek strains of thought, including the Stoics, who prized serenity and inner peace above all else.  Being reminded of others in need stirred up pity and compassion—which were seen as negative emotions.  They were unnecessary disturbances to the soul.  Then there were the Hedonists, who were so focused on their own pleasure, they had no time to notice the needs of others.   These worldly viewpoints were 100% NOT God’s viewpoint!  James is very blunt.  If you have found faith in Christ, your faith MUST be manifested in concrete actions to care for people in need.

We’re down a few parking spaces at church these days, because on Wednesday morning, these piles of lumber were delivered to our church.  By Saturday afternoon, these pieces of wood will be transformed into all the walls of a house.  That’s going to require a lot of action!  We will need people to measure and cut the wood, gather the right pieces for each wall, hammer the pieces together, mark the walls according to the plans, etc.  We will need parking lot helpers, greeters, runners, and cleaner uppers.  We will need people to prepare breakfast and lunch.  On Sunday after worship, all the walls will get loaded onto a truck.  That means we will need strong lifters, smart arrangers, and again, cleaner uppers.  There will be an incredible amount of doing this weekend at Lima.

And the question on my mind is, why?  Why will we do all this work?  In part it’s because we want to make life better for someone else, which is wonderful.  But I also think it’s because we know deep down there are some blessings, some gifts from God for US, that cannot be gained any other way.  A friend of mine participated in a Help Build Hope weekend in April, and he told me about being there with his 9-year-old grandson.  “Pop-pop, these nails are broken!” he said, after unsuccessfully trying to hammer a nail straight into the board.  Finally the tenth nail was not broken. What a relief!  There was at least one good nail in that 16 pound box!  As frustrating as pounding the nails was, guess what the grandson told his carpool on Monday morning when they picked him up for school?  “I built a house this weekend.”  Putting his faith to work gave him the gifts of accomplishment and pride.

Putting our faith to work also gives us the gift of integrity.  Belief alone is not enough.  James reminds us that even the demons believe!  For our faith to be complete, for it to be integral to our lives, it must manifest itself in good deeds.  Faith and action must work together.  James goes on to give two dramatic examples.  Abraham’s great faith in God manifested itself in obedience when God called him to take Isaac and sacrifice him.  This is how heavy and scary it feels sometimes, to be called by God into action.  But acting according to how God commands us is the bedrock of faithful living.  James also lifts up Rahab as righteous.  Her story is recorded in the book of Joshua.  Israelite spies had been sent to Jericho.  Rahab gave them shelter, she disobeyed the soldiers who came looking for the Israelite spies, and because of her actions, the New Testament describes her as righteous and virtuous.

I don’t know anyone personally who has been asked to harbor spies like Rahab, or has been called to sacrifice their child like Abraham—and indeed, these are complicated stories James chooses to use as examples.  Maybe that’s because the decision to engage in good works often turns out to be more complicated than we anticipate!  Ask anyone who’s gotten involved in good works, and I’ll bet most of us at one time or another have prayed, “God, I did not sign up for this!”  I remember praying those words while on a mission trip to South Carolina.  One of our mission team members fell and broke her ankle, and I was designated to be her buddy while she was in the emergency room at the local hospital.  It just so happened the A & E Network was running a 24-hour marathon of Duck Dynasty, and every television in the wing was tuned to it. I was fine with travelling to South Carolina.  I was fine with the summer heat, working in the kitchen and helping on job sites.  I was fine with barely warm showers for a week.  But four hours of duck calls, interspersed with the painful cries of the team member who broke her ankle?  That was a sacrifice I did not anticipate making!

I imagine you’ve had experiences like that, too.  You’ve heard that saying, “No good deed goes unpunished!”  We resist getting involved, doing good, sticking our necks out—because we know it’s going to be messier than we anticipated.  But what is the alternative?  James says, “faith by itself, it not accompanied by action, is dead.”  Dead is a pretty strong word.  I don’t know anyone who wants a faith that is dead.

We don’t want a church that is dead, either.  James’ pronouncement about faith needing action inspired me this week to pick up a book I’ve been meaning to read for months.  It’s called, “Autopsy of a Deceased Church” by Thom Rainer.  It’s a slim little book, but it packs a powerful punch.  He is a church consultant and has spent years researching what makes vital churches flourish and dying churches die, and one of the main points he drives home in this book is, vital churches do good works for others.  They put their faith in action.  They are more concerned with building the kingdom of God than they are preserving themselves.  The Autopsy of a Deceased Church book can be summed up with a few words written two thousand years ago by James.  Faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead.  Religion—whether practiced in the institutional church or a house church–if it doesn’t manifest itself in caring for others, it does not lead to the new and everlasting life Christ sacrificed himself to give us.

Thankfully, Lima Church has throughout its history been a congregation that loves to do good.  Which works out good for me, because I love to be part of doing good—as long as there are no Duck Dynasty marathons involved!  I believe God has given us—clergy and laity—a vision, that Lima Church is a church family that cares about all families.  We can build on the rich legacy we have inherited here and explore new ways to manifest good in the world.  One of the new ways we are trying to do good is Help Build Hope, where in one weekend we will turn these piles of lumber into all the walls for a home.  We cannot solve every problem for every person.  But there is good we can do.  And we are going to do all the good we can, because that is how we stay spiritually alive.

Since I am in my fourth year now at Lima, I am going to go out on a limb and reveal something about myself.  One of my favorite authors is Anne Lamott.  She lives in California and is a devout Christian and an exquisite wordsmith.  She crafts essays that make me wish I were a tenth of the writer she is.  But she swears a lot, and her political views are somewhat extreme.  So I almost never quote her in sermons, because I don’t want to offend anyone.

But now that we’ve known each other a while, I figured, I could tell you about something she wrote in her book, “Traveling Mercies”:

“Again and again I tell God, I need help, and God says, “Well, isn’t that fabulous?  Because I need help too.  So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I’ll figure out what we’re going to do about your stuff.”

When I read that, I just started to laugh, because that is so me.  Again and again I tell God, I need help!  And instead of giving me the solutions to the problems that nag at me, God says, here’s someone who needs communion.  God visit them.  Here’s someone who needs prayer.  Give them a call.  Here’s an idea that needs championing.  Get a move on.  These things never involve the people and situations that feel most urgent to me.  But somehow, by God’s grace, while I’m busy doing the good I can do, God is gradually working behind the scenes and beyond my limited perspective, making a way for something new to spring forth in ways I would never expect.

That is why I think James is right when he says, “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”  Without action on our part, we would never give God the chance to act on God’s part.  We would miss out on the blessings, the sacred gifts, that we can only receive if we decide to partner with God and do all the good we can do.  Gifts like a sense of accomplishment and pride.  Gifts like being able to stand tall and walk by faith with integrity.  And blessings we cannot explain, like the gift of being able to look back and see that God was indeed at work on the stuff only God can do while we were focused on the stuff we could do.

One important caveat:  remember, it’s all the good we can do.  It’s not all the good.  No one person is responsible for saving the world.  The job of Savior has been filled, and I didn’t get it, and you didn’t get it…There will always be tension between doing good for others, and taking good care of ourselves.  James does not specifically address this issue, but I think it’s fair to say, religion that does not encourage us to care about our neighbors in need is not true religion.  But religion that does not encourage us to care about ourselves is a distortion as well.

I am looking forward to being able to report to you next week how our Help Build Hope weekend went.  But for now let me close by asking you this important question:

Want to hear my construction joke? 

I’ll tell you later—I’m still working on it!

James says faith, if it has no works, is dead.  To that I would add, faith, it if has no sense of humor—is dead!  So go ahead, and do all the good you can, even though it will be more complicated and messy than you expected.  If nothing else, you might end up with a good story.  But the really good news is, we will end up in God’s story of repairing the world.  Amen.