John 14:15-31

06/13/10
John 14:15-31
Hudson UMC

A while back, I made the decision that I needed to keep pressing through the Gospel of John and get through it just a bit faster. What that really meant was that I would not, in general, spend more than one week on a particular passage. This meant that, even if a single sermon would have to leave many important ideas unsaid and even completely untouched, that would just have to be the case. So far, it has worked out pretty well, but when I came up with this text, my heart broke because there is so much good stuff in it and I would only have a chance to speak generally and briefly on it, boiling it down to just a few main ideas. Now, you all might be thrilled that I am just boiling it down, but I want to remind you as your pastor who loves you and longs for you to explore the Scriptures and live by them every moment of every day that it would be well worth it if you spent some time and energy pondering the words of Christ here. It is a mine full of the very riches of God and you would never run out of things to learn from them.

However, given that we simply don’t have time to spend weeks on end on this particular passage, I have just a few main points to make about the incredible words of Christ. For centuries, and especially since the rise of Protestantism, there has been a heated debate over two major things in the Christian life. These two things are faith and works. First, I want to put before you the argument on behalf of faith. God has promised to make us His children, to adopt us into His very family on one condition and one condition only, that we believe in Jesus. This insistence on only faith is extremely offensive to humanity, because we desperately want to do something, anything, to contribute to our salvation. Salvation by faith, the key to understanding Christianity, absolutely destroys our self-sufficient American attitude that makes us think that asking for help is weakness and that we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Salvation by faith says to this attitude, “There is no salvation except that which comes from God without any help from humanity at all. The only faith that will save us is the faith whose hands are empty and brings nothing to the table at all.” Real Christian faith is not a faith in our own ability, but an utter conviction that we simply aren’t good enough on our own and that God must be all of our hope, all of our confidence, and all of our joy. Any hope in our own works is a denial of God’s grace.

Against this is the argument for works in the Christian life. It doesn’t take much for us to look around and see that there are people who say that they have faith in Jesus but constantly act as if Jesus means nothing to them. To be a Christian means to work, not less than the non-Christian, but more. To hope for a Christianity that does not place moral demands on us is to hope for a Christianity without Jesus. Nobody spoke more about doing good to our neighbors, of helping the poor, about going out of our way to show the mercy of God to others than Jesus did. Jesus does not even acknowledge a possibility of following Him without taking up our cross, that is being willing even to die, and following Him. There are countless moral obligations pointed out, not just in the Old Testament, not just in the epistles, but in the Gospels themselves. To say that we should not place a high priority on what we do but only focus on what we believe is a wholesale denial of the Gospel and an abandonment of the Jesus that we claim to love.

Both of these two strands of argument have raged throughout much of Christian history. Both sides are absolutely convinced of the fact that they are right and that the other is wrong. In fact, many times, you will get people who were once on one side and then on the other and argue for their new position with all the passion a convert. Those on the side of faith point to the arguments of Paul and his absolute insistence on faith as the core of the Christian faith and his unwillingness to allow works to have a place. Those on the side of works will point to the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Matthew and the letter of James to point out that the Gospel does not ignore how we live but that good works are part of our daily lives.

Now, if you are anything like me, you listen to both of those arguments and you nod your head, saying to both of them, “Yeah, you’re right. All of that makes good sense.” The problem is that so much of the tradition has taught us that we can only have one or the other, that they stand over and against one another, as natural enemies and as enemies to the true Gospel. Our deepest experience as Christians does not want to believe that we have to choose between faith and works, but since we are surrounded by so many who think that they can’t go together, we sometimes feel pressured to do just that.

But if we look in this passage, with Jesus’ words to His disciples, do we see this kind of fighting over whether faith or works are more important? No. We see Jesus saying things like, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me,” and “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words,” and, interwoven with this emphasis on obedience in our lives, we hear Him say that the Holy Spirit will come and abide in us, that Jesus will not leave us as orphans but will come to us, that we do not need to be worried because the Spirit will continue to teach us day by day, that, because He lives, we will live as well, and that all of the things He is telling us is so that we may believe. We do not even get the smallest hint that these two strands should be in conflict in any way.

In fact, if the way Jesus speaks of our radical obedience and the absolute priority of grace in this passage tells us anything at all, it should tell us that the ideas cannot be separated at all, that they are utterly interrelated and that we cannot argue as if they are opposing views without destroying the relationship with God that He has established. Real faith, according to Jesus, cannot exist without corresponding action. However, this action is, at every moment, enabled and bolstered by faith and cannot exist without it. We will go more in depth about this continuous, dynamic and personal way to think about the Christian life when we consider Jesus’ image of the vine and branches next week, but it is enough for us today to be reminded that real Christian action simply cannot exist except where it is generated, encouraged, and empowered by Christian faith by the Holy Spirit.

So, in spite of the ocean of ink that has been spilled on behalf of promoting faith apart from works or promoting works apart from faith, we see that the choice between faith and works is a false one. I think that the reason we want to choose between them is because it is so much easier to live if we just reject one of them out of court. After all, it is hard enough to emphasize either one or the other. It is next to impossible to do both. Did I say, “next to impossible?” That is silly. There’s nothing “next to” about it. Living our lives emphasizing both faith and works is something that is utterly beyond all of us. And yet, this is indeed our call. Perhaps this is why Jesus made such a big point about assuring us that He was not leaving us as orphans, that the coming of the Spirit will strengthen us from day to day. We have the promise of God that assures us that, because of our participation in the life of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can indeed do this impossible thing called the Christian life.

Again, it is critically important that we understand that faith and works are not different things that we can play off, one against the other, but two sides of the same reality. We can see it here, where Jesus speaks so pointedly about the utter need to obey and keep His commandments if we hope to be His followers and yet treats us with incredible kindness, taking the burden off our shoulders and fulfilling it from within us. But, if we actually read the Bible without allowing the debates of others to force us to read it in a certain way, we see that faith and works are interwoven throughout all of the New Testament. Indeed, even in the Old Testament, the life of faith was accompanied by a corresponding way of life. But, when we look at James’ insistence on the need for works, how does he speak of it, as works that are independent of and against faith? No, but as a way to show whether the faith we think we have is dead or not. Whatever else we might have if we do not do good works, it certainly isn’t living and active faith.

Even Paul, the mighty defender of salvation by faith does not ever imply a faith that is utterly without works flowing from it. In his letter to the Romans, where he explores the idea of faith and the Christian life most carefully, Paul spends a full five chapters at the end, explaining how everything he has said before has concrete consequences in the Christian life and that, to live with the faith of Romans 1-11 without a life that answers to Romans 12-16, is something that never even entered into his mind. Even in his letter to the Galatians, where Paul is more prepared to warn against any works of our own contributing to God’s grace, he does not entertain a possibility of a Christian who does not have a life flowing with the fruit of the Spirit. A Christian whose life is not thoroughly marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control is a contradiction in terms.

The New Testament is of a single voice in saying that there is no Christian faith that does not manifest itself in works and that there are no genuinely Christian works that do not spring from an actual participation in Christ by faith. Brothers and sisters, that should be enough. It should be enough for us to listen to the apostles, who gave their lives to proclaiming the word of God, who are the foundation upon which our Lord has built His church, who are the leaders who do not point to themselves and their own authority, but to the very authority of God, to which they are subject. It should be enough to say that the entire New Testament cries out with a unified voice that we are to be people of faith and action and that those two things must never take away from each other.

It should be enough, but just in case it isn’t, it is not just the New Testament that has affirmed both sides of this tension. Methodism under John Wesley did the same thing. Though Wesley wrote thousands and thousands of pages, sermons, treatises, letters, and his lengthy journal, chronicling the Methodist Revival of the eighteenth century, there might be no better way to understand this twofold emphasis on faith and works than by what it meant to be a Methodist at that time.

If you wanted to join with the Methodists, you were only asked one question, “Do you desire to flee the wrath to come,” that is, are you a sinner who wants to be forgiven. However, if you wanted to stay a Methodist, you had to agree to do three things: Avoid evil, do good, and use the means of grace. You couldn’t be a Methodist and still engage in a life of sin or avoid doing the good that you are able to do, or to not be at church, worshipping with the larger body and participating in the sacraments, as we are about to do. And if you did those things and refused to hold true to your commitment, they would simply not renew your “ticket” for the next quarter, which was your pass to come to the Methodist gatherings.

Surely Methodism under Wesley emphasized works. If you wanted to be a Christian without works, whatever you were, you certainly weren’t a Methodist. However, in spite of the major emphasis Wesley put on obedience to God, he always warned the Methodists of degenerating into what he called the “dead, empty shell of religion.” And what was this but avoiding evil, doing good, and using the means of grace. Wait a minute. Weren’t those the very same things that he said you had to do to be a Methodist? They are indeed, but if they are being done, even with fervor and passion, but without real living and vibrant Christian faith, they are as useless as an empty shell.

In a moment, we are going to celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion. The sacraments of the church also add their voices to the utter inseparability of faith and works. When we are baptized, especially if we are baptized as infants, we are not baptized because we have already been transformed, but because God has claimed us long before we ever knew He existed. And yet, though the initiative in baptism is all God’s, we are forever stamped with an indelible mark, a never-ending commission to live the rest of our lives as those who are set apart for God. Communion is no different. What have we done to deserve to come to the very table of God? We can look back over even just the last week and see example after example where we were not the people of faith that we ought to be, where we did not respond as Christ would, but as the world would. If our participation in the Lord’s Supper was limited to our earning it, it would be an empty table, a meal that would have to remain uneaten and unshared.

But thanks be to God that this is not the case. We are not invited because we have given God what is required to participate but precisely because we have nothing to contribute. And yet, after we share this holy meal, we do not remain at the table, but go out the doors and back into the world. The spiritual food of which we partake, the body and blood of Christ, nourishes our souls and prepares us for our obedience in the week to come. We come with nothing to give, but are sent out with a story to share, with good news for the world.

So let us come to the table together, as people who hear the voice of Jesus, of Paul, of James and all the apostles, and even the voice of John Wesley and the early Methodists, and participate in the good news of God, knowing that we have not been left as orphans, and that the very Spirit of God will remind us of the words of Christ and strengthen us to do the works of the kingdom. Let us pray.

AMEN