LIFE MATTERS 5: A Study From The Book of James
James 2:14-26
February 8, 2015
(Pouring a bag of Beanie Babies out on the stage)
If it were 20 years ago, there might be a mild frenzy in this room. If it were 20 years ago,
this would be the equivalent of pouring out thousands of dollars on this stage. If it were 20
years ago, some in this room might be wondering what vintage of rare bears I just poured
out on stage. Are the tags intact? Are they in good condition? Some of you in this room
know exactly what I am talking about because some of you in this room, 20 years ago, had
Beanie Baby fever.
In 1986, Ty Warner invested his whole savings into launching the company that would
bring forth Beanie Babies in 1993. By 1995, Beanie Babies were one of the hottest toys on
the planet. Through a devious business plan, Ty Warner controlled supply and demand of
Beanie Babies and created a frenzy. A new Beanie Baby would be launched on a regular
basis. A small supply would be produced and distributed to stores and then the bear would
be discontinued. The new thing arrived, sold out quickly and it was gone. A new bear would
then hit the market, it would sell out quickly and it was discontinued. This created a frenzy.
People lined up for the newest thing. They lived for it. Not only for the thrill, but for the
promise that this new thing would multiply in value, that this teddy bear would somehow
skyrocket in value and they would be the beneficiary.
This mania, this frenzy, this craziness was a bubble. Speculation built upon obsession with
a seemingly limited supply of a new thing. There are multiple stories of adults who lost
their entire savings by “investing” in Beanie Babies. There are amazing stories of people
who bought plastic containers to protect the tags and protect the bears. Overnight, people
treated colored cotton like bullion. People treated sewn animals like mined silver.
Besides the silly idea of infinitely producible and limitlessly replicable textiles somehow
multiplying in value, what ultimately popped the Beanie Baby bubble? What brought
otherwise thoughtful adults back down to earth? What made people realize their
retirement did not lie in a teddy bear collection? A simple question really: What does it do?
Within that question is a real question of value. Beanie Babies have an aesthetic value, but
they ultimately satisfy no real need. The demand for them is hopelessly inflated. What do
they really do? In this real world of ours, what need do they address? What problem do
they fix? What does it do? Once people began to recognize that they were hopelessly
addicted to the new bear, the promise of the next limited edition acquisition that promised
enlightenment, nirvana and riches, they began to ask, “What does it do?”
Most collectibles end up succumbing to this type of logic, baseball cards, Precious Moments,
whatever tchotchke or bauble has lived in your house at some point, the question emerges,
“But what does it do?”
James seems to be asking that question today. With the polished faith sitting on many
shelves of his written audience, James is posing the potent question, “But what does it do?”
With well-reasoned faiths that have their tags in protective covers, James is wondering,
“But what does it do?” For the faiths that have collected every new teaching and have
libraries of theological nuances to their beliefs, James is asking, “But what does it do?”
James 2: 14-19
If you are new with us or haven’t been here with us in awhile, we are on the tail end of our
Life Matters series. At SFC, we know life is busy, and we know life is complicated, and we
know that you want your life to matter. The invitation of Jesus is for eternal and abundant
life and so the question comes, “How do we find it? How do we find the life that Jesus
offers?” If you asked 100 people that question, you would get 105 different answers. What
is abundant life? How do you find the life that God offers? At SFC, we think the answer is
simple, simple and biblical, simple, biblical and redundant. It is a pattern throughout the
Bible…really in each book of the Bible. The key to the life that God offers is found in doing
three things: Life in God, Life with Others and Life for Others.
Life in God is intentional Christ-centered worship. Life with Others is practicing your faith in
Christian community. Life for Others is serving and sharing in the name of Jesus. We have
spent two weeks on each of the first two goals, and we are in the final two weeks of our
series as we focus on life for others, serving and sharing in the name of Jesus. In all honesty
this may be the weakest leg of the stool in most Christian churches. People really try to
focus on worship through their devotional lives, through Sunday attendance, through
worship music. People really like Christian community too. It is nice to have people to
share life with, to know and be known. But Life for Others is intrinsically difficult. We are
self-interested characters at our core. It’s what preserves us but also what fractures us.
Often we are hopelessly self-interested, and so Life for Others is a growth area for many of
us. Unfortunately, it is not a binary. It is not a switch that we turn off and on. It is something
we either get or don’t get. It is something that we have to remind ourselves of often and
something we have to learn and re-learn again through discipline and practice to put
ourselves in the way of service.
That brings us today to the potent words of James. He is going to give an illustration about
how we may or may not serve others. He is really facing a faith bubble about people who
are polishing their Bible study medals. People who are proud of their deep Bible studies,
but he decides to pop their bubbles by asking, “But what are you doing with it?”
Verse 14 starts off with a potent question, “Can someone say they have faith but no deeds?”
The Greek word here is erga, which means “works of Christian righteousness.” While this
has in mind moral issues, it is much more concerned with works that benefit other people,
acts of service. The good works in this passage are not going to church or not getting drunk
or not having an affair. Those are all good things, by the way, but those are really expected.
They aren’t work. Work is something that you strive towards, something that costs you
something, something that takes effort. James says, if you claim to have faith in Jesus…but
don’t have erga…proactive good deeds on behalf of others in the community, then can that
faith save you?
Over the next few verses, James will answer his own rhetorical question and the answer is,
“No.” If you don’t have erga, then you are feeding the bubble. He gets to the heart of this in
verse 19.
Mental ascent does not equal a robust faith. James says that the enemies of God have a deep
knowledge of God. They believe in God…and they shudder. A robust faith is transformative.
It is more than knowledge. It is transformative. It transforms your allegiances to Christ and
re-orders your priorities so that ergas becomes common place. In the first century, a
philosophy was rising up that would take full form by the time John wrote his Gospel. This
philosophy was Gnosticism and it dripped over into the church. Gnosticism was not a
religion but a philosophy. Gnosis means knowledge. Gnostics were obsessed with obtaining
new and special knowledge that would unlock deeper truths. This philosophy dripped over
into the Christian church as they mingled Gnosticism with Christianity and made the faith a
series of deeper truths to be obtained instead of kingdom realities to be lived. Paul actually
combats it in his letter to the Colossians; John combats this in his Gospel and his epistles. I
think James combats it here, and I think we fight with it now.
Our modern version of Gnosticism is not that much different. We live in the age of the
internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Buckminster Fuller was a 20th century thinker and
futurist who came up with the Knowledge Doubling Curve. In this chart, Fuller noted that
human knowledge prior to 1900 seemed to double about every century. We now live in an
exponential era. By the end of WWII, knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Recently,
human knowledge is doubling every 12 months, and in the future, it will double every 12
hours. His point now tied to the expansion of the internet and the digital era is that we are
now moving at light speed. The amount of data available to us that is collated and
searchable is unbelievable. We are constantly fed more and more through 24-hour news
cycles. All of this has given rise to an obsession with the newest bear, the newest bit of
information that we can obtain. This has now bled over into the church.
Some pastors and televangelists make a living of releasing new books about new secret
teachings hidden in the Bible, new depths that can be mined from old books. They espouse
new angles and deeper interpretations that can be unlocked. There is nothing new under
the sun. What James’ church faced then, we face now to a different degree. It is the frenzied
bubble of new biblical knowledge, a polished faith that has tons of new learning.
James is begging the question, “But what does it do?” James sees the faith bubble about to
burst, so he decides to pop it himself. Faith without works is dead. Faith that does not lead
to ergas is dead. The potent image he puts forward is that of a Christian coming face to face
with a person who is ill-clothed or malnourished and a Christian looking them dead in the
eyes and saying, “Go in peace. Be warm and well fed.” If the gospel hasn’t transformed you,
then that proclamation makes sense. If the gospel hasn’t transformed you, then you are
largely self-interested, interested only in the growth of your faith, your accumulation of
faith facts and biblical knowledge. James is getting louder and louder here, “But what does
it do?” Let’s keep reading.
James 2:20-26
James employs Abraham and Rahab as examples of faith in action, faith with legs, faith that
does something. Abraham was willing to be faithful in obedience even if meant a great
personal loss. Rahab was willing to be faithful even if it meant a great personal cost.
Abraham and Rahab’s stories both foreshadow the sacrifice of Jesus, but they also are
stories of personal sacrifice borne out of personal conviction, a grand marriage of faith and
deed.
Unfortunately, this rarely seems to be the case in modern Christianity. We have made
things far too complicated. People argue regularly about doctrine and spend little time in
the field. We split theological hairs while spending little time taking risks for Jesus; seeing
hurting people and doing something about it. We would rather fight over our bear
collections.
In 1999, at the height of the Beanie Baby bubble, Frances and Harold Mountain’s marriage
had sadly come to an end. As they split their assets, one area was particularly divisive, their
Beanie b=Baby collection worth around $5,000.00. They couldn’t agree on who got which
clumps of colored textile bears, so the judge ultimately ordered them to bring the entire
collection to court and they were ordered to pick one at a time until they were gone. They
had a Beanie Baby draft in divorce court.
https://i.imgur.com/kqRNO6M.jpg
It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to laugh or feel sorry for these two, but it is so easy
now to say, “But what does it do?” Ironically, just as sad, many Christians are arguing about
theological nuance and Biblical interpretation. We have allowed our polished faith to
extend past our action. This picture is not much different from the one our neighbors have
of us splitting hairs, arguing over minutiae, fighting over teddy bears. Meanwhile poverty is
growing out of control, disease is spreading rampantly, relationships are fracturing all
around us and community is being dissolved.
Faith…what does it do?
Here is something new for me, and I don’t mean that in the sense of “deeper new” that you
can polish and put on your faith shelf. Something obvious and simple, something plain that
I have missed. I have read this passage plenty of times and focused on the scary and
threatening idea of having a dead faith. You can easily read this passage and be shamed or
fear-mongered into doing more in order to prove you don’t have a dead faith.
But you guys know me (hopefully), and I am far more interested in a pull than a push. I am
far more interested in the call to enjoy God’s promises than scaring you with perceived
threats. If faith without works is dead, then faith with works is alive, vibrant, joyful and
fulfilling. When you step out and say, “What does this faith thing do if I take God seriously?”
If he is real and powerful, and if he has a calling on my life then what happens when I step
out and attempt big things for him?
I could try and shame you and say, “What about the poor person? What about the diseased
person? How can you claim to love Jesus if you don’t love them?” I am not going to do that.
I want you to find an invitation to more life, to greater life, to the adventure of putting your
faith into action, to leveraging this idea and daring God to show up and show off.
Our church supports a ministry in Romania that cares for orphans who have, in most cases,
HIV and special needs. You want to talk about the least of these? Chi Rho Ministry has
found them in a post-dictator era in a broken country. In the last weeks, two of the kids in
this ministry have passed. When I say kids, I mean 25 and 26 year olds, and this ministry
has been humming for over 20 years. Now death is infinitely sad and heartbreaking, but
without this ministry, all of these kids would be dead. Twenty years ago, any Romanian
orphan would barely survive, let alone those with special needs and HIV, and yet with
enough love, enough medicine, enough care, these kids, who were not expected to live past
two got 20+ more years.
The question today is, “But what does it do?” This is the answer. It gives life. It gives life to
others and it gives life to you. I think you will be amazed by what God may do in and
through you in 2015. This passage shouldn’t be menacing or threating, and by no means do
I want you to stop being in Bible studies or BSF, but be careful. If you are collecting
knowledge with no outlet, it is dangerous. God has much bigger things in store for you. Life
to give. Life to receive.
I have told you this a few times before but it bears repeating. The Bible is a means to an
end. It is not an end unto itself. It is not a thing to be ascertained and given mental ascent
to. It is not a collector’s item to be protected and sealed in plastic. It is a how-to manual for
a life unlike any other. You are supposed to read passages like this one and not argue over
the participles and sentence structure. You are supposed to read passages like this and
dare people in your small group, “What can we do with this? How much can we give away?
What step of faith could we take? What kind of crazy adventure could we take and invite
God to show up?”
This is one of the many reasons why we do Serve Sundays. Our next one is in two weeks on
February 22. I think sermons are great, and I hope you like them too, but we have Serve
Sundays so you have an outlet. They are a chance to take a step of faith. A chance for you to
say that the Bible is not God but God’s word to us, a word that calls us to take risks and
dream big dreams. A chance to model ourselves after our Savior, who gave, served, fed,
clothed, healed, reconciled and loved in his father’s name.
I want you to sign up for Serve Sunday. I know a lot of you serve in a lot of places, but there
is something potent about all of us answering the waiting world’s question. The question
when they see a life built upon faith, “But what does it do?” Check out this video from our
last Serve Sunday and see what faith does.
Serve Sunday Video 10/26/14