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Who Is Justified by What?
A Sermon Given
by the Reverend Douglas A. Taylor
on November 28, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Responsive Reading:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate
context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, hoever virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend
or foe as from our own,
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is
forgiveness.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
Sermon:
I would not say I am rigid about my early morning rituals, but it
is fair to say that I, like most of us here, have a few habits and
patterns which seem to get me going with the right mind set to
face another day. Allow me to share a sample of my regular
morning routine. After hitting snooze a few times, I give up trying
to convince myself that there might be a very good reason to stay
in bed, and I get up. Following some stretching, I holler up to the
kids to remind them to get dressed, make their beds, and come
down for breakfast. Then I shower and get dressed myself, and
head down stairs to make a small pot of coffee. Being the only
coffee drinker in the house has its perks. My little coffee pot
makes enough for two cups and because I am the only coffee
drinker, I get them both; which is a good thing because I tend to
need them since becoming a regular reader of the morning paper.
After I have retrieved the paper from the front step, I remove it
from its plastic bag and spread it out on the table. With my first
cup of coffee in hand, I scan the front page to see if anything
major has happened in the past 24 hours. I then quickly skip on
to the Style section and flip it open to the comics, or the "funnies"
as we called them when I was a kid. I used to make a pretense
and flip through all the preceding sections until I got to the funnies,
but I recently quit that because I found it hard to really absorb
information when all I wanted to do was read the funnies. So I
read the funnies first now and get it out of the way. By the time
I have finished the funnies, I've also finished my first cup of
coffee. So, with my second cup, I delve into the headlines and
their articles.
And about four weeks back, this headline caught my eye: "Faiths
Heal Ancient Rift Over Faith." And then in smaller headline print
right under it was: "Catholics, Lutherans End Doctrinal Dispute."
This stopped me. This was very interesting. It is not often that
religion makes the front page except when we are blowing each
other up or arguing about what religious group is building a
temple, mosque or church on someone else's holy ground. But this
was about a major reconciliation. The Lutheran/Catholic split was
the first one during what is now known as the Protestant
Reformation. (And if they were ending disputes over doctrine, that was
big!)
Let me share a brief sketch of the history:
On the eve of All Saints, October 31, 1517, an Augustinian monk named
Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg
Castle Church. This is often considered to be the beginning of the
Reformation period. His chief complaint in the Theses was the
selling of indulgences by the Catholic Church. An indulgence is like a
"get out of jail free" card in Monopoly. Peasants and nobility alike
would buy these indulgences from the church to release their recently
departed relatives and loved ones from Purgatory. Purgatory being that
stopover before heaven where souls were cleansed of sin. Where they were
to be purified, or purged. This was not imagined to be an enjoyable
process. So people were willing to pay for these indulgences for their
loved ones. It was said by one of those who sold the indulgences, that
"as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory
springs." (Brother John Tetzel)
Now, soon after the Reformation, the Catholic Church did change
their policy on indulgences and stop selling them. This was not,
therefore, the prominent feature in the big debate and the
subsequent split between Catholicism and the first Protestant
movement. That honor goes to the difference of opinion regarding
Justification.
Luther essentially split from the Catholics because he believed we
are justified by faith alone. There is a particular Bible passage
which illuminates this debate. It is from the letter attributed to
James, the brother of Jesus.
What good is it my brothers and sisters, [he writes] if you say you have
faith but do not have works? Can faith save? 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. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works
will show you my faith. [James 2:14-18]
This is a succinct statement for the perspective that the Catholics
put forth on the issue of Justification. Luther didn't like this
passage, or this epistle, this letter, for that matter. He even
questioned its appropriateness in the Bible. He called it the
"Epistle of Straw," meaning he thought it was a worthless letter,
and therefore unworthy of the name "scripture." After all, if the
passage from James could complain about faith without works,
could not the counter be a complaint against works without faith?
Luther much preferred passages that extol the virtue of faith, such
as is found in the gospel of Mark for example (Mark 9:23) where
it says that "All things are possible to him who believes." But
apparently, all things, including disputes over theological
interpretation, mellow with age.
To quote from the article which appeared in
The Washington Post on November 1, it says:
The argument that has preoccupied Lutheran and Catholic negotiators. . .
involves what is called the Doctrine of Justification. Lutherans have
believed that faith alone, an acceptance of God renewed every day,
ensures eternal salvation. The Catholic Church has long taught that
salvation comes from the sum total of faith and good works -- that a life
of devotion and service on Earth earns the faithful the key to heaven.
The key language of today's Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of
Justification appears to give decisive weight to the Lutheran position on
salvation through faith, while embracing an ethic of earthly service
championed by Catholics.
Which leaves me wondering, "Who won the debate?"
Over the past few years I have heard a lot of ecumenical dialogue
going on. There are many agreements between denominations to
share pulpits, education materials, and even communion with each
other. These have primarily been pacts among Protestant
concerning community, worship, and pastoral issues. This new
Joint Declaration, unless I have really missed the boat, is
significant in that it brings a theological issue under scrutiny and
emerges with a document of reconciliation.
So what does this all have to do with us? Why should Unitarian
Universalists care if the Catholic Church and Lutheran Church
decide to take the ecumenical dialogue beyond the level where we
all agree to disagree? Why should we take note? Well, other than
the obvious importance of being informed of major shifts on the
theological and ecumenical landscape, I think this line of
theological question is worth some thought. I'm not so much
interested in the question of salvation. Our various Unitarian
Universalist perspectives do have a lot to say about salvation. But
I'd like to work a little with "faith," because I think we understand
the "works" part well enough. But faith is one of those words we
have begun using again, with poetic licence. And so I feel it is
good to dig into this "faith" we talk about.
The great commandment, as it is known, came from a question, according to
the authors of the Gospel of Matthew, a question asked of Jesus by a
lawyer. Really, you can look it up in chapter 22. A lawyer asks, "Which
is the great commandment in the law?" (Referring to the ten
commandments.) And Jesus gives him two answers instead of one. After
all, it was a lawyer who asked. "To love the lord, your God, with all
your heart, soul, and mind; and to love your neighbor as yourself."
And this leads us to the question asked next. Well, who is my
neighbor? How do I recognize my neighbor? And we hear the
story of the Good Samaritan. I think it is interesting that the
culture was such back then that the question was: "How can I
recognize my neighbor?" Because today we have a new question,
I suspect in great part due to the question asked back then. We
have learned the answer about the neighbor. Now we want to
know: "How we are to recognize this God we are to love?"
Saint Teresa of Avila wrote, in her book, Interior Castles,
that
... the surest sign that we are keeping these two commandments is, I
think, that we should really be loving our neighbors; for we cannot be
sure if we are loving God, although we may have good reason for believing
that we are, but we can know quite well if we are loving our neighbors.
[P. 115]
You will notice, perhaps, that I said just a few minutes back that
I wanted to talk about faith, and then started to pick apart the
commandments about love! Well, love and faith are not
synonymous, but they are related. Paul wrote that three things
abide, faith, hope and love, "and the greatest of these is love."
(I'm weaving a variety of biblical texts in and out here this
morning and I want to be clear. I am using the Bible as a source
of further questions and perspectives, not as a proof text or answers
for any of this.) The greatest of these is love. Which could be
interpreted to say that faith is the least of these. Faith, hope, and
love, in that order.
I remember about a year and a half ago, a professor commenting
about something to that effect while reflecting back over the
preceding year. She was an African American, and someone asked
her what she thought about the work we as a denomination have
been doing toward racial justice. She thought for a minute and said
carefully, "I have hope for our movement now. Last year at this
time I only had faith, now I have hope."
If faith is a stance taken with little or no supporting knowledge or
evidence, and hope demands a reason, a reason for hope, some
evidence to the affirmative; then finally, love is a stance taken from
a good chunk of evidence and knowledge. Paul didn't just pull
these three words out of a hat. Faith, hope, and love, in that order.
It seems to me as though all this balderdash about faith is missing
the mark. We should be focused on Love, not faith. Love is
greater that faith, faith is just a leaping after convictions with no
basis in reality. Luther spent so much of his time and energy, so
much of his thought, plunged into the pith and pulp of faith, how
much greater it would have been to have focused on Love! But
this Faith is all we hear about from him.
So I try to focus more on love. I see many UU's doing the same.
We talk about God as love, we talk about our churches as
covenanting communities, and covenantal theology is rooted in
love. We see the call to service in the world as the call to love our
neighbors as ourselves. But sometimes, quite a few times, love is
more of an ideal than a reality. To truly love one another takes a
lot of work. I suspect that we end up with a lot riding on faith.
My early morning routine, the coffee and the funnies, and even
hitting the snooze button, are done by rote. There is a dash of love
in it, for without that it would be merely duty; and that would grow
bitter in time. So there is some love that gets me going in the
mornings. Mostly however, it is routine, inertia. Once I sit down
with my second cup of coffee however, and begin to actually read
the paper, it is full of problems, disasters, death, and hate. When
I read the paper, I need more than routine and inertia to keep me
going. I have faith that people can be, and often are, good. If I
look thoroughly, I will find some evidence for that, a cause for hope.
Other days, when I read the paper, I lack the strength of spirit to do
more than skim the it. On those days I put a lot on faith. But that is
good after all, because the opposite of faith is fear!
And this is not just about my morning paper. It is about any time
reality provides little evidence for hope. And I have learned that
when push comes to shove, I can manage without the coffee if I
must, but I can't do much when things get tough without faith.
This is where I find faith, when I am at the bottom. And from
there indeed compassion and good "works" do arise! So I suppose
the question of faith vs. works all depends on your perspective; two
sides of the same coin and all that. If you want to find it in
yourself, look for the faith first, but when looking at another
person, or if you seek to show another person, take the "works"
side of the coin.
When the storms of life are raging, in the midst of tribulations, in
the midst of my our faults and failures, and when I find myself in
my darkest hour, I have faith that there is meaning in life, that
there are good people in the world, that I am a good person, even
when I find little to no evidence to the affirmative! I have faith,
simply, that it matters.
In a world without end, may it be so.
cluuc@his.com
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