5th September 2021, Trinity 14

Lectionary Readings for the Fourteenth Sunday of Trinity

James 2: 1–17

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please’, while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there’, or, ‘Sit at my feet’, have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonoured the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

You do well if you really fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For the one who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgement will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgement. What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Mark 7: 24–37

From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ But she answered him, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of  Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’

Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday of Trinity

These two words—-this one small phrase, sola fide—-set Europe on fire and split it apart in the sixteenth century. Sola fide: by faith alone.

Martin Luther, a great hero of mine, was only one of those who began to question the abuses that had set in by his time within the structure of the church.

In the medieval Western church two doctrines had developed:

One, punishment after death for the sins accumulated in life, a punishment only partly erased by good works—-such as going on pilgrimage, saying prayers, or giving to the poor. The greater the number of sins, the greater the punishment.

Two, the concept of purgatory. Rather than being damned eternally to hell after death, a person would go to a place called purgatory where they would suffer whatever punishment was required until they were freed.

This doctrine invited the creation of a method by which sinners could reduce their punishments. The Pope began to give bishops the power to reduce sinners' penance while they were still alive, based on the performance of good deeds.

The indulgence system was formalized by Pope Urban II in 1095. If an individual performed enough good deeds to earn a full or ‘plenary’ indulgence, their sins and their punishment would be erased. Partial indulgences would cover a lesser amount, and a complex system arose by which officials in the church claimed that they could calculate to the day how much sin could be cancelled for a given person. During the Crusades (begun by Pope Urban II), many people set off, believing they could go and fight, and often (!), in return for the cancellation of their sins.

In the eyes of the Reformers, this system had gone hideously wrong. People who didn’t, or couldn’t, go on the Crusades began to wonder whether some other practice might allow them to earn the indulgence—-perhaps something financial?

So the practice of granting indulgences came to be associated with people "buying" them, whether by offering to donate sums to charitable works of the church or by constructing buildings, notably St Peter’s in Rome. The practice became so successful that soon both government and church were designating funds for all kinds of uses. A wealthy person could even buy indulgences for their ancestors, relatives, and friends who were already dead.

When Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses in 1517 he fiercely attacked the entire system. Among other things he wondered, why did the church need to accumulate money when the Pope could simply free everyone from purgatory by his own decision, if he chose?

And so we go back to the passage from the Book of James that we are set today:

faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

But the performing of good works had become corrupted by the very institution that was meant to preserve and hand down the Christian faith in all purity, innocence, and truth. So the great generation of Reformers, following Luther, held up this phrase,

Sola fide: by faith alone. We are justified before God on the basis of faith rather than on the basis of good works.

They took this central verse in the second chapter of Ephesians as their corrective and their countering claim:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

Works are not a cause of forgiveness, but a result of forgiveness.

We are modern, and perhaps we cannot imagine ourselves back to a time when doctrines of faith mattered so much, mattered so much that persons died in battle on one side or the other.

And though Luther stated that faith alone gives life he also said, in his great Introduction to Romans, that a living, creative, active and powerful thing, is this faith.

Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever….Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire!

And so we go back to Jesus himself. The good works of Jesus flowed out of his compassion for the need before him, of the poor, the sick, the broken-hearted. They were the inseparable outcome of his faith in the God who had sent him.

But here is the disturbing feature of the passage we are set today, from Mark’s Gospel: Jesus at first refuses to help a woman who begs him to heal her daughter. And, moreover, he calls her a dog, an insulting and dishonouring term. How can this be?

This is a very interesting encounter, looking more closely. In both Hebrew and Aramaic the word “dog” refers to the wild or semi-wild dogs of the streets, scavenging for whatever they could get. But in rabbinic literature “dog” is used metaphorically for a person who is unlearned in the scripture, Mishnah, and Talmud; for ungodly people; and for Gentiles.

The reason why Gentiles are regarded as inferior is that they do not have the Torah.

The woman, who is a suppliant, of no status, a foreigner and outsider, a woman!—-overcomes the difficulty posed by Jesus’s refusal by means of wit and selfabasement. The wit consists in her transformation of the scavenging dogs of the street, used metaphorically by Jesus in his refusal, into domestic dogs, which have access to the part of the home in which the family has its table and eats its meals. Her self-abasement is expressed in her acceptance of this softened metaphor of “dogs” for “Gentiles.” Her faith that Jesus is able to drive the demon out of her daughter is so great that she is willing to abase herself in order to secure his cooperation. This selfabasement also implies acceptance of the chronological and qualitative superiority of the Jews in the history of salvation expressed by the claim of Jesus that the “children” must be fed “first.”

Jesus recognises and affirms the woman’s wit and self-abasement….

He heals her daughter.

Another healing story follows, in Mark. Of a deaf man who has an impediment in his speech.

At the end of this story, when this good act becomes known, all around who contemplate this healing are astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’

He has done all things well is an echo of Genesis 1:31—-

And God saw all the things that he had made, and see, they were very good.

Jesus, the charismatic healer, is acclaimed as the agent of God in the eschatological renewal of creation—-all around understand this good act as a sign that God is breaking into human history, re-claiming us as His own good creatures.

So. Faith and good works. Good works and faith. They cannot be separated.

Jesus, whose love for us was always active, whose acts to save us from ourselves culminated in his sacrificial death, this Jesus is the only purifying force for His church, the church that came into being to proclaim his love. Scripture is a way to understand the full force of this kind of active saving love and how it works to reclaim us, sinners as we are. As I keep saying, we have to read it!

Some passages of Scripture seem to be at odds with one another; some complement one another; some complete the sense of others. The Bible needs to be read as a whole, read also with an understanding of the time in which those many hands wrote it. But it is our faith that as we continue our faithful reading it will illuminate our own lives. We will be guided by the truth it contains.

If we do not know about the life of Jesus we cannot attempt to enact the love he lived. For Christians, the acts of love that flow out of our faith are infused with that same ever-flowing, overflowing love of God that sent Jesus to us in those days long ago.

We are to continue in the great faith we have been given, so that our acts of mercy, compassion and healing carry words of grace into acts of grace. We cannot separate the heat and light of fire: we cannot separate faith and good works. May we come to embody the active love of Jesus in all that we do!

Amen.

The Revd Dana English

The Benefice of Holland Park, London

September 5, 2021