Real justification

A sermon on James 2:1-5, 8-10, 14-18

Jesus asked his companions “Who do people say I am?” It’s a good question ask about many of the people in the Bible. Take the author of the letter of James, for instance. How do people say he is? Unlike Jesus, James didn’t engage in any sort of “I am” statements so we are left with tradition to help us answer the question. Church tradition proposes that this letter was written by James of Jerusalem who was the brother of Jesus. However, there is nothing in the letter to identify the author as that James or any other. We really don’t know anything about the author, except that he wrote in fairly sophisticated Greek, something that might be unlikely if it were written by a simple Palestinian laborer. Some early church writers cast doubt on the identity of the author. Every book in the Bible has some measure of mystery about it. The uncertainty surrounding the book of James became an important issue for Martin Luther.

It is a Lutheran urban legend that Luther wanted to throw James out of the Bible. He did clearly express his doubts as to its origin. Here’s what he had to say; “Though this epistle of St. James was rejected by the ancients, I praise it and consider it a good book, because it sets up no doctrines of men but vigorously promulgates the law of God. However, to state my own opinion about it, though without prejudice to anyone, I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle…”
The center of Luther’s historic disagreement with this book is found in today’s reading. “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” About which Luther had this to say “In the first place it is flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of Scripture in ascribing justification to works. Luther had his Road to Damascus moment – his big epiphany – during his contemplation of the Letter to the Galatians in which Paul wrote that we are “justified by faith in Jesus Christ.”

This has set up centuries of conflict about the role of faith and the role of works in our hope for salvation. But as always, context is everything. Luther’s issues with “works” came from his fight nearly to the death with the church hierarchy in Rome. He was particularly offended by the practice of indulgences. An indulgence was an action – usually a charitable one – undertaken after confession, absolution and penance in hopes of lessening one’s punishment prior to admission into heaven. I must confess that I can’t follow the logic of it. During Luther’s time, there had developed quite a lot of abuse around the selling of indulgences. It looked to Luther and others, as though the church was acting as a broker for sinners to buy their way into heaven, to buy God’s forgiveness. The church banned such practices in the 16th century but apparently under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, indulgences have made a comeback – but that’s beside the point of this sermon, I was just shocked when I saw it the other day.

Luther fueled the Protestant Reformation with his outrage at these abuses and planted his flag firmly in “justification by faith through God’s grace.” Faith in Jesus was the only way to be saved – the only way to be justified. The idea that anyone could play a role in their own salvation was an anathema as Reformation theology developed.

Well, Luther had his epiphany in the book of Galatians; I have had mine in Marcus Borg’s new book on Paul(The First Paul). What Borg and his partner Dominic Crossan have done – what they have uncovered and reclaimed is nothing short of “knock me off my horse and strike me blind” kind of stuff.

I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night thinking about this and mostly I have been wondering whether or not anyone will really care. You see, what would you think if I told you that the entire premise on which Christianity has been packaged and passed down to us is wrong? We have been told that in some distant time, long after we have left this mortal coil, the golden moment will come when we will all be raised and dwell with saints and angels in heaven. Our goal is get there, to not mess up so badly that we find ourselves on the outside looking in at the good times in God’s Kingdom. Some time after Paul wrote to his churches, Christianity became about the next life. Marcus Borg, God bless him! has been gently leading us with his book on Jesus and now his book on Paul, to the possibly uncomfortable awareness that we’ve had it all wrong.

Jesus and Paul did not talk about the promise of a better life in the next life. They both preached and lived the kingdom realized here and now. Borg points out that the question of “justification” may be stem from a misunderstanding of the word itself. It is defined in my Handbook of Theological Terms as “that act by which God brings man back into proper relationship with him.” It involves the forgiveness of sins, supernatural grace and all sorts of things. There are all kinds of disagreement about it – mostly around faith and works. Are you justified by simply believing in Jesus or does how you live your life have anything to do with it?

Borg and Crossan smack us between the eyes with their simple observation that Paul’s use of the words “justify” and “justification” are to be understood in a much more direct way. When we believe in Jesus, which means that we commit ourselves to what he was doing, then we can no longer act the way the world acts and we become just. We create justice and we do this here and now in our families and in our communities. Go figure that “justification” means “to become just!” With this definition, we can then actually understand that we are only right with God when we are right with each other. The letter of James makes more sense when we hear it in this light. You cannot be “in Christ” and live in the old way. Unless it shows in how you live with others, it isn’t of Christ – it is dead faith. Paul built churches with the intent that they would be a new kind of community and be like the mustard seed and spread like mustard. Previously unequal, hierarchical relationships, both personal and political would be transformed into just relationships of complete equality and then we would all see the kingdom.

But it didn’t happen that way. The world was too in love with power and the violence that maintains it to let go of it. The church was not able to resist being assumed into that world. Paul’s crazy experiment was just too dangerous for the ways of the world. So it was co-opted. The church became the most hierarchical institution ever imagined and lost it voice against the powers and principalities of the world. “Justification” was taken out of this world and redefined into the afterlife. The people who were granted full participation in Paul’s communities, women and slaves, were told to get over it and behave. The message was changed and we were all told to wait for justice until that time in the unknowable future.

I have found this profoundly disturbing and liberating at the same time. It fires my imagination and gives me strength. But my question remains – are we any more ready for the real Christianity now than we were 1900 years ago? Does knowing this change anything about how you understand why you belong to a church or why you might believe? Does this help you answer Jesus question “Who do people say that I am?” We can offer several answers, “He is the one who will get us into heaven?” or “He is the one who showed us and helped us to create heaven on earth?”

What we want for our children

A sermon for baptism

There is nothing more adorable than a little one, just after a bath. They jump in all sticky and sweaty from a full day of play and emerge sweet smelling, their fingers wrinkly, and too cute for words after their hair is combed and their little jammies donned. Then they climb into your lap and cuddle for a story before surrendering to sleep. I apparently am in serious need of grandchildren! But even if I were not in such a condition, the sight of a child washed free of the world’s grime would still make me go, “aaaw!” There’s something about the innocence and vulnerability that makes us want to give them everything, the perfect life, the perfect world. That’s a pretty tall order, even for the most accomplished and energetic among us. It also invites some questions….

What would a perfect life look like? Does perfect mean that the answer to every prayer is ‘yes?’ Jim Carey’s movie Bruce Almighty gave us a humorous take on that. If every prayer were answered with a yes, everyone would win the lottery, get into an Ivy League school with a full scholarship, marry the most beautiful girl or the smartest, richest man. You would get every job you applied for and be well paid. We would all be perfect physically and always healthy. This kind of life only sounds ideal for how could there be any sense of accomplishment if everything were handed to you? How could we ever develop a sense of compassion? Such a life would be the death of imagination, so I don’t think that could be what we mean when we consider what a perfect life would be like for little Sara Jane, who is, after all, about to get her holy bath. What do Scott and Amber envision in their hopes and dreams for their daughters? What do all of us want for our children?

I think that we want for our children is a world filled with the things that the apostle Paul identifies as the gifts of the spirit in his letter to the Galatians; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It’s hard to argue with such things but I think we also seek something more - a world that is fair, a world in which hard work and honest effort produce a satisfactory outcome; we want a world in which there is an opportunity to express and actualize what we sense is useful and fun. We want a world in which we enjoy some level of security, both physical and emotional. We want a world in which we have some level of ability to choose and make our own decisions about what we do and how we do it. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that such desires are fairly universal—we all want this for our children. But the real question for this morning is how badly do we want this for all the children of the world?

Now let me ask you, how many of you think we live in a just world? How many of you think that we live in a world in which there is justice for some and not for others?

Let me take this a little further, do you believe that the things we want for our children could actually be jeopardized if the world continues to be an unjust place? Martin Luther King reminded us on more than one occasion that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Continued injustice keeps the Kingdom of God unrealized.

The prescription for this condition is right in front of us – we see it in the cross, we hear it the Gospel, we taste it in the sacrament of bread and wine. It is a commitment to the Kingdom of God which is possible when we give ourselves up and become the true Body of Christ.

We know the difference between how our world operates and how God would have it operate by what we know of Jesus’ life. Jesus’ first words in the Gospel of Mark, the earliest record of his teaching, were “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” In these words, Jesus becomes the sunrise of God’s time on a broken world. And then he set about creating the Kingdom wherever he was, starting with healing all who were brought to him. In God’s Kingdom, no one is sick. He fed people who couldn’t afford to feed themselves. In God’s Kingdom, no one goes hungry. He lifted up little children as examples of how all people are within the kingdom of God. He called people on hypocrisy and gave hope and good news to people who for whom those were in short supply. The deaf man in today’s Gospel needed Jesus’ intervention to be able to hear the news of God’s love and God’s will for his life. That healing wasn’t the healing of just one man, but all of humanity that had been deafened and made voiceless by indifference and injustice.

Jesus knew that the work was not his alone. He gathered people around him who heard the message he delivered and believed in God’s Kingdom. He shared himself and his power with them. That power is the one that we become a part of when we are in Christ. Having our ears and hearts opened begins it. Baptism is our yes to God’s invitation and with every subsequent baptism, we recommit ourselves to what we want for all of the children of God. We are promising to do all that we can to give Sara Jane and every other child a just world, a peaceful world, a world that looks more like the Kingdom God today than it did yesterday.

Injustice that defiles

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23


It’s not easy to understand what is at stake in this morning’s Gospel reading. Is it really about washing your hands before eating? Yes and no. The reason that I go through the ritual hand washing before celebrating is an honoring of the purity and holiness laws in scripture. It’s not really about making my hands germ free – heaven knows that a little water poured over my fingers can’t do that – it’s a tradition that is an enacted metaphor. I step into a different place when I approach the altar to become a part of the mystery. The hand washing is a symbolic gesture that prepares me to do so, just as the kissing of my stole when I put it on and take it off – it sets apart as holy the time during which I wear it. It’s a good thing. So I don’t think that it’s the kind of thing that was at the bottom of the spat between Jesus and his critics.

While we will never completely understand each portion of the purity code in scripture, why meat cannot be cooked with dairy products or why certain animals are clean while others are not, what we do know is that the ideas behind the development of the dietary laws were to set the Jews apart from the culture of their captors while they were in Babylon. This code was a visible sign that clearly defined who belonged in the community and who did not. It was very important for the survival of a people in captivity. It’s no wonder that this sort of thing became an issue again during Jesus time. The influence of the Greco-Roman culture was a threat to the integrity of the Jewish way of life. You cling fiercely to your traditions when you feel threatened. So it wasn’t just the tradition of washing hand before eating, it was the larger tapestry of what it meant to be a “holy people”

Prolific Catholic author and theologian Jerome Neyrey explains the purity or holiness system this way; holiness is an attribute of God which comes from God’s power to bless which is achieved mainly through the creation of order. When order is maintained, the people prosper. The holiness codes seek to keep the categories of creation distinct. That included people as well as foods. The purity laws provided an organizing principle for Jewish society, some basic categories that determined your often determined place – pure or defiled, clean or unclean, in or out. In times of stress, people are much more likely to enforce such social traditions strictly in an attempt to feel that there is something you can count on.
Prof. Neyrey says that “While Mark presents Jesus challenging the Jewish purity system, he also describes him as reforming it in favor of other core values. He is "the Holy One of God" and agent of God's reform: he is authorized to cross lines and to blur classifications as a strategy for a bringing about the Kingdom of God about which he preached incessantly. As God's agent of holiness, Jesus makes sinners holy and the sick whole.” Jesus redefines holiness. He offered a broader understanding of who and what is acceptable to God.

What Jesus was shining a light on was the unintended consequence of the holiness laws – they became an instrument of classism. Consider the plight of the poor in Israel at Jesus’ time. They were barely surviving, many were malnourished. If you and your family are starving and the only food you can forage is the mussels that cling to the rocks in the Sea of Galilee, what are you going to do? Say, “Ach, shellfish are unclean, can’t do that!” or are you going have them for dinner? If you are a day laborer working in the hot sun clearing rocks out of a field where the only water is the precious little that you have saved for the hot afternoon ahead, are you going to use it wash your hands before eat your meager lunch? I think what Jesus is doing in today’s Gospel is showing how the traditions of his faith had succeeded in marginalizing a whole lot of people. In another passage when his friends are criticized for working on the Sabbath because they picked some grain while walking through a field he says, “the Sabbath was created to be a blessing to people not a hardship.” The Sabbath commandment could be the source of suffering if the only day that you have to gather and prepare food for your family is the day when you don’t have to work for someone else. In Jesus’ eyes the only way for the Sabbath to be available for everyone was for the world to be transformed into the Kingdom of God so that everyone could afford to take a day for rest, refreshment and prayer. The poor don’t have that luxury.

We generally have a sanitized image of Jesus, he would never say anything crude. Well, keep in mind that Jesus was a part of a very earthy culture, speaking with farmers and laborers and he understood how to communicate with them. He was not shy about using humor and satire so today we have Jesus, channeling his inner-fourth grader, and comparing the evil that is expressed by a class system to that which comes out of the human body. There was apparently no snappy comeback from his critics when he equated what they were doing to excrement. I mean, what could you say but “Oh yeah!” Mostly they went away thinking “Rats! He did it to us again!” Jesus did his bet work when he turned the tables on self-aggrandizing, moralizing bullies.

It’s important that we not be too hard on Jesus critics. They lived in their world and had the where with all to not have to consider the lives of the people that were flocking to Jesus, until they became so numerous as to be noticed. People in Orange County are shocked to learn that in this beautiful prosperous place, there are over 35,000 homeless people. I’ve had two conversations this week in which that information caused jaws to drop. These were not arrogant, mean, moralizing people, they just didn’t know.

I look at my life and frankly, it looks like Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of God. I am healthy and if I’m not, I have insurance that pays for my medical care, no one tells me I can’t go certain places or do what I want to do, I have more than enough to eat, as evidenced by those couple of pounds I’d like to shed before Melanie’s wedding, no one in my family is in debtor’s prison, I have a beautiful home that is full of love and peace, I get to decide what I want to do on my day off. The question for me is what is my response to such blessing? The only thing that makes sense to me and that allows me to sleep at night is to commit myself to work on behalf of those who are not so outrageously lucky. The Kingdom of God already here, it is just waiting for us to tear down the walls that are keeping people out. I pray that that is a compelling enough vision to be the reason that we come together as a community of faith. There is a lot of resistance to such an idea.

Gary Cummins is the Rector at St. Luke’s in Long Beach and he shared a story in a newsletter this week. He said, “ When I was in seminary, our very old, very thin, very traditional, and venerable Liturgics Professor always spoke in a very low voice. He enunciated very clearly or taking notes would have been an exercise in futility.

One day he quietly unfurled a story from the Sixties when our Book of Common Prayer was being revised. After the service one Sunday morning, a parishioner complained about a verse in the prayers in Morning Prayer service – “let not the hope of the poor be taken away.” The parishioner raised his voice in outrage, “That’s Communism!” Gary’s quiet professor, gave voice to his still evident frustration and shouted, “It’s not Communism, it’s the Psalms!”

I would add, it’s the Gospel, it is our mission, I hope it is our reason for being here together this morning.

Unearthing Paul

A sermon on Ephesians 5:21-33

This week, I’ve heard from daughter Melanie about a variety of wedding details, not the least of which was her decision not to have father “give her away”. For those of you who know Melanie, this probably comes as no surprise, but it happens to be very relevant to the lessons presented to us today bringing us the words “wives” and “subject to” in the same sentence. —the last time this one came around, I dodged this one – probably substituted Winnie the Pooh.

Today, though, I felt more prepared to tackle it because Marcus Borg has a new book that he wrote with Dominic Crossan called The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. You just know I have to love this.
There are a number of important contextual points that apply to this one of Paul’s letters. First is that, of the thirteen letters that bear his name, only seven are thought to have actually been authored by Saul/Paul of Tarsus. Three letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are commonly knows as the “pastoral letters” and appear to have been written some time after the turn of the 2nd century. Their historical setting is quite different from that of Paul, the church planter. Somewhere in between Paul’s seven letters and the Pastorals the remaining three letters, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians were written, and probably not by Paul. This has been recognized for quite a long time, primarily due to the very different voice and vocabulary used in the letters. Borg and Crossan arrive at what they call the three “Pauls.” The original voice of the seven letters they call the radical Paul. They call the voice of the pastoral letters the reactionary Paul and the other three disputed letters, including today’s challenging one from Ephesians, make up the conservative Paul. Our two scholars have done an incredible job of drawing out the differences and identifying the reasons that letters like Ephesians do not reflect the Christian vision of the real Paul. Clearly the later letters suggest that the communities Paul had been addressing were having difficulty absorbing his message, so the writers started to alter that message. It reminds us of the similar difficulty many people in Jesus’ immediate culture had with his message of non-violent, self-sacrifice for God’s kingdom of peace and justice.

The original voice of Paul was one of transformed lives and relationships. He tackles the relationship between slaves and their owners in the charming little letter to Philemon. It is an amazing example of persuasive genius. Paul leaves his friend, Philemon, with little choice but to free his slave Onesimus, because Paul demonstrates how they are equals in Christ. Fast forward several decades to the writing of the letter to the Ephesians in which we find this – “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ…masters, stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same master in heaven and with him there is no partiality.” It does not sound like the original Paul, though there is at least a nod to making life better for slaves. However, in another couple of decades, in the letter to Titus we hear this, “Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they do may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior.” This is clearly antithetical to Paul’s vision. As Borg and Crossan point out, “there is nothing there about any mutuality of obligations for slaves and masters. And there is nothing addressed directly to slaves. There is a single verse, and it begins, ‘Tell slaves.’”

This is why it is so critical to take on the contextual meaning of all scripture. Here we not only find that Paul’s message was co-opted but that it potentially arms anyone wishing to provide Biblical support for slavery with some rather shocking ammunition. Don’t you suppose that letter was used once or twice in the plantation churches to keep slaves in line? It’s pretty good ammunition to be able to say, “see, it’s right here in the Bible!”

All of this makes our reading from Ephesians a lot less problematic than it might seem. Sure, the letter is in there, but we shouldn’t go blaming Paul for it. The voice of the radical Paul has quite a different understanding of the proper Christian relationship between men and women. In the 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul presents a vision of equality in the family—what right for one is right for the other, and what is wrong for one is wrong for the other in matters of divorce, abstinence, and equality in the assembly and equal entry into the community of apostles.

As with Paul’s view of slavery, this prescription for equality was a shocking development for a patriarchal world and sure enough, within a couple of decades we are treated to the revisionism of today’s reading—and while the expectations established for the behavior of men is more challenging than the local culture was used to, it still falls far short of the radical equality Paul believed in and articulated in his original seven letters.

These two examples of equality incorporated into Paul’s radical vision are the means by which he taught his congregations to participate in the work of atonement. Patriarchy and slavery are endemic to cultural systems in which some segments of the population were dominated by others. For Paul, Jesus’ death on the Roman cross and his subsequent resurrection was an indictment of that system of domination. The question we have to ask ourselves is “how much has really changed?” Do we not still allow the radical vision of both Paul and Jesus to be co-opted by more recent interpretations that are designed to perpetuate some group’s domination of another? How many women have had scripture used against them in abusive relationships? How long did slavery continue, justified by Biblical references that have been improperly attributed to Paul and made authoritative?

Paul was able to grow Christianity because people were hungry for freedom from an imperial system. But we live in a democracy that survived ended slavery and drastically altered our cultural view of gender relations. Today we have a non-white president, and we have Bishop Katherine, Speaker of the House Nancy and Secretary of State Hilary. Many inequalities have been breached even though not every heart has been won.

There are things in the letter to the Ephesians that I love, some truly radical things like “universal salvation” but it’s really important that we understand what has happened here and ask, if the earliest Christians were not ready for such a radical message are we? It takes great courage to stand against the things that seek to dominate and oppress us. It means to swim against the flow of your culture, sometimes your immediate community or family. But once armed with an understanding of the transformation Jesus and then Paul offer us we stand ready to be made into more than we ever thought possible. Once we know that, the only questions that remains is, “do we really want it?”