August 29, 2021 - 14th Sunday after Pentecost - When you pray, don't forget to use your feet

When you pray, move your feet." West African proverb

Pastor Patricia Kessel from Trinity Episcopal Church was our guest pastor today. Rather then preaching on the Gospel Pastor Patricia gave a sermon on the James 1:17-27 reading which starts:

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures. 

After the West African proverb, she continued with a pertinent Buechner quote:

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet" Frederick Buechner on Calling: Your Deep Gladness & The World's Deep Hunger

"Calling" naturally assumes a caller. As Buechner notes, for the Christian, this Caller is the living God.

What makes hearing this call so difficult is that God's voice is not the only voice calling out to us. The challenge is to hear God's voice in a cacophony of voices.

"There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest"

To differentiate God's voice Pastor Patricia highlighted that the work a person does should bring great joy and advocated that if it doesn't a change should be made.

She pointed out several times that Martin Luther called James an “epistle of straw.” Luther dubbed James an “epistle of straw” not in his preface to James, but originally in his more general preface to the NT. However, Luther’s declaration was removed from this preface in all editions of his German Bible after 1537.3 It did not mean Luther dramatically changed his view about James. But it signals that care should be taken about extracting too much from the phrase “epistle of straw.”

James brings an action-oriented perspective to the principles that we can trust God to provide for us and that we must work for the benefit of others in need. If faith is real—if we truly trust God—then our faith will lead to all kinds of practical actions for the benefit of others in need. This perspective makes James an eminently practical book.

Interesting how our Lutheran perspective always dances along the comfort level of saying salvation is through God's grace and trying to establish the "worth" of good works. There is Bonhoeffer's cheap and expensive grace, for example.  For those who believe we be tempted to believe that the work we do on God's behalf will somehow affect his judgement, James is problematic but not incompatible with that belief.

I believe I will be spending some more time reading James and discovering the treasure of these words. I will keep the West Africa proverb in mind and remember that moving your feet is not something that is not something to brag about or that calculates in God's judgment of you.