James 1:17-27

One of the things I enjoy most about my annual vacation is worshiping with other congregations.  I feel kind of like a homemaker who, after planning, preparing and serving family meals day after day, welcomes the chance to go out and enjoy a meal planned, prepared and served by someone else.  But I also look forward to coming back home to the familiar, domestic routine of our congregational life and ministry here at Faith.  That is especially true this year.

For the first time since I was ordained seventeen years ago, none of the worship services Rosarie and I attended included the celebration of Holy Communion.  My four-week fast reminded me that receiving the body and blood Christ in the sacrament is more than just a religious ritual.  The real presence of Jesus in the Lord’s Supper a makes real difference to our experience of God’s love and to our sense of spiritual well being.  Rosarie confirmed that lesson as we drove home following worship last Sunday.  The first thing she said to me was, “I’m starving.”  And she went on to say how much she, too, had missed partaking of the bread and wine of Holy Communion.  We both felt spiritually under-nourished.  Not because the hymns and prayers and scriptures and sermons weren’t satisfying – they were.  They simply weren’t enough. 

Even Jesus’ sermons weren’t enough to sustain a full and healthy spiritual life.  He said so himself:  “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53)!  Just as a healthy life physical life depends on a balanced, nutritious diet that includes all five basic food groups – grains, meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables – a healthy spiritual life depends on the full course meal of weekly worship that includes both word and sacrament.

Of course  worship alone does not fulfill God’s call to faithfulness.  In today’s Gospel, for example, the liturgical police challenge Jesus:  “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”  For them it seems, religious purity, or holiness, meant little more than going through the cultural motions of established religious rituals.  But Jesus, in rather politically incorrect fashion, calls then hypocrites, quoting the prophet Isaiah:  “This people honors [God] with their lips, but their hearts are far [off]; in vain do they worship [God]…”

It seems that, for Jesus, religious purity, or holiness, means more than observing dead, empty religious ritual.  Authentic worship – that worship “in spirit and truth” (John 4: 24) Jesus calls for – fulfills itself in holy living:  “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.  For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come…”  No, worship alone does not fulfill God’s call to faithfulness.

On the other hand, without faithful, regular, weekly worship we cannot become God’s holy people either!  In the proclamation of God’s word, God’s Holy Spirit transforms our naturally evil hearts and inspires our good and godly intentions; and through the sacraments, God’s Spirit gives us the gift of  faith – the strength, the energy, the courage – we need to carry out the good and godly intentions of our newly transformed hearts.

But whether we act on the faith God gives in word and sacrament remains up to us.  And so today James challenges and encourages us to “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.”  In worship, James reminds us, we may hear God’s heart-transforming word and be filled with the divine gift of faith, but unless we live out our faith in the everyday life of the everyday world, we will become weighed down and sluggish like people who eat too much and exercise too little.

And James offers a practical word of advice about how to exercise our faith:  “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this:  to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  The people of God in Christ are called to become personally involved in serving the poor and rejected victims of tragedy and injustice – around the corner, and around the world.  And there is no shortage of opportunity for such faithful service.

Rather frequently, after a wedding or funeral, strangers will come up to me and comment on the worship service.  Often they will begin with the words, “I’m not a very religious person, but…”  I suppose them to mean that they don’t pray, read the Bible, or even attend worship very often.  Perhaps they have been turned off by their encounters with the so-called religious people James has in mind and Jesus meets in today’s Gospel.  But, as both of them teach us, being religious – in the full sense of the word – means working to reflect in the world the Holy Communion of God’s love, peace and justice into which the church is transformed in and through faithful worship around God’s word and sacraments.

Peter Lisinski is pastor of Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church in Fergus, Ontario, Canada