“Our Time to be Doers and not Hearers Only” – sermon

James 1:17-27

•  A couple weeks ago a late night talk show host dedicated a portion of his show to an issue that he had actually been working on for a few months. He had been investigating TV preachers to see what kind of ministry they engaged in with the people who watched them at home.
• He began by saying that most churches aren’t like the churches he was about to profile. That took all of about five seconds. Then he spent the next fifteen minutes showing video clips from various TV preachers who go about convincing people that if they send money in to the preacher’s ministry, they will personally benefit.
• He showed video clips from well-known preachers; from Creflow Dollar and his multi-million dollar jet to Robert Tilton and his mansion/parsonage. But the message from all these preachers was essentially the same. The money you send in to them will be like a seed you plant in the ground.
• The financial seed you plant in the garden of their ministry will sprout up into a money tree for you. Or to put it more bluntly, pay them, and you will get rich. Which is a lot more assurance than you get from some of the lottery commercials. One lottery commercial says of your odds of winning, “Hey, you never know.”
• These preachers are saying, “God’s at work here in my ministry. There’s no doubt. There’s no maybe about it.” OK Fine. So this TV host started giving money to one of these preachers just to see what happened.
• His experience was that for months this preacher sent him one request after another for more money. The ministry offered him prayer cloths that he was supposed to send back with checks. And as always, there was a promise that a financial blessing was just around the corner. All he had to do was send in more money.
• So this TV host had an idea. He looked up the IRS requirements for a church and saw that they didn’t include anything specific about what you had to believe or teach in order to be a church. So he filed the paperwork and incorporated his own church. Of course, there was no church, but he paid his fees and incorporated one anyway.
• He named the church Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption. He registered himself as an ordained minister. Now any property his church owned was tax exempt. And since he had a TV show, he was able to put a phone number and a website on the screen and ask people to start sending in money. He also promised, jokingly of course, that if you send money in to him, you’ll be blessed by God. That was two weeks ago. He’s received thousands of envelopes with thousands of dollars in donations.
• Well you all can just imagine what the reaction to this story was among people in their 20’s and 30’s. They lit into churches across the board. The story made us all look like a bunch of hypocrites whose only purpose is to talk people out of their money.
• I’ve never seen so many of my Facebook friends call for churches to lose their tax exempt status. But I have to keep reminding them that the real work of churches is to be doers of the word. The problem these younger folks have with the preachers profiled in this story is that they don’t seem very interested in doing real, tangible things for Christ in their community or around the world.
• When you’re telling people that God will make them rich if they give money to this ministry or that ministry, you’re training them to be self-centered. You’re not teaching them to love God or love their neighbors as themselves. You’re teaching them that the Christian faith is about what I can get out of God for myself. How can I manipulate God for my own gain?
• I want to point out the contrast between that approach to the Christian faith, and the one which we read from the Book of James this morning. James 1:27 says true religion is caring for the orphans and widows in their distress and keeping yourself unstained from the world.
• Or to put it another way, true religion is doing for others. It’s not taking for yourself. That’s one of the places where these preachers have distorted the Christian faith. But they’re not the first ones. This kind of distortion dates back to the earliest days of Jesus’ followers.
• The Book of James, which is named after Jesus’ brother James, has as one of its focal points the selfishness of people in churches when it comes to the way they relate to people outside the church.
• The author reminds his audience that their own lives originate in God’s own word. He tells them that even though they were born of human parents, in a way it was God who gave birth to them. God gave us the most prominent place in all of creation.
• On top of that, we’ve received the gift of Jesus. He gave his life for us, and he’s left us with his teachings. The author says those teachings have the power to save our souls.
• You’d think that in response his readers would be eternally grateful. You’d think that realization would make them kind and generous to one another. But his observations of the way people in churches treated people in the community was much like what I saw on that late night talk show.
• They were happy to receive what was being offered to them in terms of salvation and Jesus’ teachings. But they were completely uninterested in doing anything with it. They did not use what they had been given to benefit others.
• He compares that kind of response to God’s grace to someone who look in a mirror and sees their face for a few seconds and then walks away and forgets what they look like. To put it more clearly, when we hear the word of God, it helps us see ourselves clearly for who we are, for what our place is in the world, and who God is calling us to be.
• But the people in the churches he was writing to seemed to forget what they heard from God once they left the worship service. They forgot their place in the world, they forgot their status as people who were chosen and redeemed and honored by the creator of the universe. They forgot about what God was calling them to do in their lives.
• They forgot that the only kind of Christian faith which matters is one which is displayed in acts of kindness and service to others. You know, the whole widows and orphans thing. They left church after worshipping and forgot about that.
• He calls them hearers of the word. But he says they´re not doers of the word. And unless they’re doers of the word that they hear, he tells them their faith is literally dead.
• What I take from this passage is that our path forward as a church will be strong and healthy and vibrant to the extent that we are doers of the word; to the extent that our main focus is on doing things in this community, not just in the church, but in our community, which are the equivalent of caring for widows and orphans in their distress.
• To the extent that we do so, our church has plenty of years left. We can go on forever that way. Now at the end of the service, we’re going to have a special time of giving towards some of the building projects we’ve had to undertake this year.
• We’ve replaced the 35 year old air conditioning units. That’s why it’s comfortable in this room today. Next month we’re replacing the 25 year old roof. That’s so we won’t have portions of our ceiling failing in because of water leaks like we did this past winter and spring.
• I mention these projects because I want to make sure we’re all clear on what’s happening here. We’re not fixing things around here so that we can have a nice church building. We aren’t spending 2/3 of a million dollars in repairs in 2014-15 so that we can be more comfortable.
• We’re raising this money today because these improvements to our building will enable us to be doers of the word. If we were just going to be hearers of the word, there wouldn’t be any point in getting together at all, much less spending a bunch of money on the building.
• Having a working, adequate space like this building for worship, learning and fellowship is important because it is here that we learn, it’s here that we’re inspired on Sunday mornings. It’s here that we have an opportunity to fellowship with each other.
• But let’s not confuse those things with doing the word. They help us do the word. But they are not the totality of doing the word, and we cannot use them to replace doing the word. Doing the word is when we use what we hear and see and experience in church to go out there and do what God’s word tells us to do.
• The time for us to be doers of the word is now. It’s 2015. I know it’s easy to look back at different periods in the church’s history and say, “You know, that’s when we used to be doers of the word. That was the peak. It’s been all downhill from then. I wonder how far down the hill goes.”
• I know it feels that way. I know you’ve heard people say stuff like that. But it is a false narrative rooted in fear and despair and a very limited vision of what God can or even wants to do through us. We cannot be doers of the word and still subscribe to that false narrative.
• Our time is now. God is calling us to be doers now. So I want to give you some tips to help you understand the difference between hearers and doers of the word. Because sometimes it’s hard to tell. Sometimes people confuse hearing and doing.
• One of the ways to make sure you’re a doer of the word is to take a real serious look in the mirror, just as the author tells us. And I want you to ask yourself, “What is the word God implanted within me? If I’m the first fruit of God’s creation, as our author tells us, what is unique about what I’ve received from God?
• You can’t be a doer if you don’t know what that is. You can’t be a doer if you don’t know what you uniquely offer to God’s kingdom on earth. Every one of you has received the implanted word of God within you.
• We tend to think that means we all read the same Bible and as a result we all believe the same things and therefore we all do all of the same things everyone else does as doers of the word. But if we really believed that, the point of faith would be to just be like a bunch of robots who all do the same thing in the same way.
• The Bible tells us that God has made each one of us uniquely for a unique purpose. And you have to figure out what that is. The church can’t tell you what that is. We can help you figure out just how you’re uniquely empowered to be a doer of the word.
• But each of us has a responsibility to God and to each other to figure out just what it is that God has implanted within us. You can’t be a doer of the word if you haven’t spent any time trying to figure out the content of the word that’s been implanted inside of you.
• We’re so used to trying to figure out what the institution of the church needs that we often forget to even ask what we bring to it. And sometimes when what we offer is different from what the church is used to, we either assume we’re wrong in our assessment of ourselves, or we write off the church as being out of touch with who we are.
• I beg of you this morning: Don’t do either of those. Trust God. Trust this congregation, trust this community to honor the word God has implanted within you. As a Baptist pastor who also plays in a rock band and rides motorcycles, I can tell you that people will accept your uniqueness, even if the word God has implanted within you is really different from what people are used to.
• They will accept that you are broken, that you are unique, and that you are redeemed because they themselves are broken, unique and redeemed. That is the word God has planted within you, and you can’t be a doer of the word if you can’t come to terms with that.
• Lastly, doers of the word must be focused on the needs of their community. Whatever we do for the church must be focused on needs outside of the church. The money we spend fixing the building must ultimately benefit the people outside of the church if we’re going to be doers of the word.
• Look again at what the author tells us about pure religion. It’s caring for widows and orphans in their time of distress. He’s talking in very concrete terms about the kind of primary ministry the church ought to be engaged in.
• But in a symbolic way he’s saying that our focus should not be doing stuff for the church. Our focus should be helping our community. He didn’t say that pure religion is serving on a church board, even though that’s very important.
• He didn’t say that pure religion is maintaining a beautiful building, although that’s very important. He didn’t say that pure religion is enjoying fellowship with one another, even though that’s very important.
• He said that pure religion is community outreach. Attentiveness to the needs of people around us. Helping when we see a need arise among people who don’t go to the church. Using our unique gifts as a congregation to help underserved populations. Having people’s backs when an emergency arises.
• That’s what he means when he challenges us to be doers of the word, and not hearers only. Ask yourself, which ministry of the church over the last few years has drawn the most consistent interest and involvement from people outside the church?
• Statistically, it’s been our GED program. There are all kinds of people who don’t attend our church and honestly don’t give a rip about our faith (yet) but they come every week to help with that program because they can believe in a church that honestly tries to respond to a real need in our community.
• They can believe in a church that takes pains to make its music program accessible to the community. They can believe in a church that organizes school supply drives for low income kids at Hines school.
• They can believe in a church that helps the neediest people in town by giving to Friendship House. They can believe in a church that produces a radio show in Spanish to help Peoria’s Hispanic community learn English.
• For them that’s the equivalent of caring for widows and orphans in their distress. And when we are doers of the word like that, the community can clearly see the difference between us and those brill cream prophets on the TV flying around in jets and asking for money.
• Even when we spend a lot of money to fix up our church building, we do so because God has commanded us and empowered us to be his hands and feet among the needy here in town and across the world.
• That is why we will be successful as a church. We will be doers of the word in new ways in this community and people will be drawn to that. That’s why I’m going to ask you to give this morning.
• As we sing the last hymn this morning, I want to ask those of you who are able, those who have thought about the word God has implanted within them, to come forward and present either your gift or your pledge toward our building improvements.