Lectionary 23 (B) — James 2:1–17 and, in a way, The Formula of Concord, Article IV
When Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, he wanted to skip the book of James (though he couldn’t bring himself to do it, since it IS scripture, after all). He wrote that it could not have been written by a real apostle, since it contradicts the writings of Paul and the rest of scripture. He calls it a Gospel made of straw, ready to be blown over by the slightest wind. So, whenever it comes up in the lectionary, I like to preach on it, just on principle, because I… am a little snot.
Luther is right to dislike it because of the last verse we read today: “Faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” But Luther is also wrong because there’s a difference between Justification and Sanctification.
You know me well enough to know I’ll throw away those churchy words and talk in normal human language. I don’t know why we do that, use these things that mean nothing to anyone. It’s pretty simple. Justification is about why God forgives our sins. Sanctification is about how we become holy.
Pretty much all Christians, from Orthodox and Catholic to much of the Pentecostal world, agree on justification. In 1999, the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church together signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. We really do agree completely. But it wasn’t always that way.
Justification, God’s forgiveness, was THE THING that split the church during the Reformation. The problem is that God values both justice and mercy. If God is truly just, then, how can he possibly just forgive people who do truly bad things? That problem is still alive today; we ask, does Hitler get to go to heaven, or Pol Pot, or Osama bin Laden? A truly good and loving God couldn’t let that happen, could he?
The medieval church said that yes, God saves us by grace, his own love and decision. But he still holds us responsible for all our sins. We have to repent, and repent through action. You get points for certain prayers and other spiritual acts, and then when you die, you earn the rest of the points you need by spending years and years in purgatory. But eventually you always end up in heaven. God’s mercy can’t be stopped, but it can be delayed by God’s justice. Someone terrible, those murderous dictators for example, might have to spend billions and billions of generations in the afterlife before they can enter permanently into God’s love. (Of course, hell was a thing too, made special for the likes of Hitler, but hopefully you get the point.)
When the church started inventing new ways to shorten all that repentance, especially ways that only benefited the church itself, that’s when the reformers objected. They said that God doesn’t require outward works to forgive our sins. Forgiveness comes through God’s grace, without qualification. We are forgiven, because God forgives. That’s what God wants. That’s who God is. God carries our sin to the cross, puts it to death, and rises again renewed. And so do we.
Easy enough. Justification. We are forgiven because God wants it. Sanctification, on the other hand, is about becoming holy. And this is a big problem, the one on which we all disagree today. For Catholics, holiness is a process that develops through the spiritual life, prayer and confession, contemplation and communion. Many of our UCC and other Reformed sisters and brothers think holiness comes from living out our faith in the world, doing works of justice and mercy for others. Methodists have a method. Evangelicals evangelize. Pentecostals believe in a second, and sometimes a third, baptism in the Holy Spirit, with different processes to bring it about.
At heart, every kind of Christian faith seems to agree completely with James. Faith by itself, without some kind of works, is dead. It doesn’t make us holy. It can’t do anything.
By now, you might be wondering what Lutherans think about becoming holy. To be honest, I thought I knew, but I decided to be sure. I spent some time this week reading parts of our old confessions, those documents written during the first three generations of the Reformation that define what Lutherans believe. They’re collected together in The Book of Concord, including the Augsburg Confession and its defense, the large and small Catechisms of Martin Luther, and a handful of other writings. Only a few pages.
I did this because I do identify as a confessional Lutheran. That’s a term that the more conservative parts of Lutheranism use to say that these writings do define them without reservation. Sort of the last word on faith.
But I’ve never been one for church-y terms. I call myself confessional because I value these old writings extremely highly. But I value them not as the last word on Lutheran faith. I value them as the first word—or the first uniquely Lutheran word, since of course the Bible is a far more important and definitive Word. They are not the roof of the house; they are the foundation dug into the rich soil of God’s revelation. And God continues to reveal to us today, even as we continue to build and seek to know God better. We are a church of the Reformation, but no one ever declared the Reformation over.
It’s funny, but this book don’t have much to say about sanctification, about how we become God’s holy people. It seems like it wasn’t a very important concern to the first Lutherans. But late in the formation of the Lutheran tradition, a group of theologians took up some of the controversies that troubled the churches of the Augsburg Confession, and lucky for us, one of them is the link between holiness and good works.
Their writing, which I agree with totally, supports James. “Faith without works is dead.” But their ddefinition of “dead” is interesting. God’s decision, God’s grace, justifies us, forgives our sins, through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Then, it is ALSO God’s decision, God’s grace, that sanctifies us, makes us holy—this time, through Jesus’ obedience. Jesus is perfectly holy.
Our faith makes us participate in his holiness. But our faith is also not a work, but is given to us by God, born in baptism, grown through the Word and Christian community, sustained in Holy Communion.
As for good works, they are only the result of our holiness. So any faith that does not produce works is, in fact, dead. But to make it alive, you don’t need to do works. You need to enrich your faith. Or rather, let the Holy Spirit enrich your faith, through prayer, scripture, preaching, sacraments, life. Works are never the input, never the cause, they’re always the result.
In short, for Lutherans, everything we have—our forgiveness, our holiness, our faith, our works, our lives themselves—comes from God. James is writing to a community that mistreats the poor and lifts up the rich, and sees that they aren’t producing works of faith. It’s not that their works are wrong. It’s that their faith is dead. A living faith in Jesus Christ would fix their too-easy-to-see wicked ways. And in that way, I think his letter is one of the most Lutheran books in the Bible.
At the risk of continuing my theme from last month… As we ponder the future of our church and our world, we might do well to ask what we can do to foster faith in ourselves and in others. God has provided for us all the resources we need to set us free and make us holy. How can we connect, and connect others, to those resources, so our faith will grow and our whole world can experience the holiness God wants for them?