The Round Church
at St Andrew the Great
Cambridge
A Sermon Preached
on Sunday 1st October 2000
by Mark Ashton
‘If anyone considers himself
religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself
and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and
faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to
keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’
We’re working through this
letter of James and we’ve got to the very last paragraph of chapter one. What a
magnificent paragraph it is!– with a great definition of religion there in
verse 27. It does not say everything there is to say about the subject: you
could hardly do that in 31 words! And attempts to summarise and to abbreviate
great matters are always problematic.
There was one Law student at
university who discovered that the secret of revising for exams was
abbreviation. He would write notes on his lectures and his essays, and then
notes on the notes, and then notes on the notes on the notes of his essays,
trying all the time to condense all he had learned into a few simple sentences.
And he had so perfected this technique by the time he reached his final exams,
that he had got it all down to a single word – a single mnemonic catalyst, from
which he could build up the answer to any Law question he was likely to be
asked in his Finals. But he went into the exam – and forgot the word! (I
believe that was over in Oxford).
So this is not so much a
classic definition of the Christian Faith, as a set of criteria for
distinguishing living faith from dead religion. After all, verse 27 does not
actually refer to Jesus. [In fact, the whole letter of James only mentions
Jesus twice, and there will be no further mention of His name after the next
verse (2:1). Moreover, the letter has only one reference to the Spirit – and
some people have actually said it’s not very Christian at all! As you may know,
Martin Luther had deep reservations about this letter of James. It certainly
has quite an Old Testament feel to it (it reads quite like some of the Old
Testament Wisdom literature, like The Book of Proverbs, for example). And it
also has quite a Jewish feel to it: in fact the word he uses for ‘meeting’
(2:2) is actually the word ‘synagogue’. But if, as I believe, it was written by
James the Just, the brother of Jesus, who had grown up in a Jewish home, with
Jesus as his elder brother, listening in that Jewish context to the words of
Jesus throughout his childhood and adolescence, then I think it’s no surprise
that this letter of James reads rather differently from the rest of the New
Testament documents, which were written by men who encountered Jesus as their
Saviour in their adult lives. James
does not keep mentioning his brother, nor does he keep specifically
quoting Him, but the whole letter resonates with the teaching and the words of
Jesus. We keep catching echoes and reverberations of His sayings (for example
the Sermon on the Mount), almost unintentionally as though James was so
familiar with Jesus’ teaching that it just flows out of him as he writes.]
So, if it is unique among
the New Testament documents for that reason, because of the familiarity of the
author with the human Jesus during His earthly life, The Letter of James is
also uniquely challenging in what it has to say to us about trusting and
following Jesus. James offers a challenge here, to Christian and non-Christian
alike, to re-examine our preconceptions. We’re going to look first at the
‘Galloping Tongue’ of verse 26, and then that ‘Necessary Balance’ there in
verse 27.
1) The Galloping Tongue (v. 26)
(a) Religion or Relationship?
‘If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight
rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless’
(v. 26).
James is not inviting us to
become religious. I suffer, as all preachers do, from constantly being heard to
be saying, “You must become religious.” No, the invitation is to enter a
relationship, to find the God and the Father we have never had, to bring our
hearts to Him so that he may begin a change in us from the inside out. That is
where it has got to start, with God doing a miracle in the heart. That word is
missing from this verse in the NIV (which we are using). The NRSV says, more
literally, ‘If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but
deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.’ James would say
that we cannot just change the externals. This is not a new leaf. It is a new
life. Nothing saddens a preacher more than when he sees people join a
congregation and pull their moral bootlaces up a bit, turning over a bit of a new
leaf in their lives and starting to conform to some of the external patterns of
church attendance. But, as far as one can tell, there is no heart change there.
That may be true of some
here this morning. Perhaps there is little evidence in some lives that there
has been a change of heart, but just a change in the externals, conforming to
the way other Christians behave: to the way other students in the Christian
Union behave, the way other members of the home group behave – with no heart
change, no face-to-face encounter with the living God. Now according to verse
18, James has shown us that this word brings us to life. So please don’t let’s
just make some external changes to our lives and think we are responding to the
gospel, with a little more church, a little more Bible, a little more giving, a
few more good works, more regular attendance at the home group. You can dress a
chimpanzee in human clothes and he may look very cute, but no-one is fooled. He
can even drink tea, and you can dub a human voice on, but he’s still just a
chimp dressed in human clothes. And that’s what human religion is: it’s a
chimpanzee dressed in clothes, aping spiritual life, but everyone can tell the
difference. And you can tell the difference if it’s true of you this morning.
You’ve put on the externals of the Christian life but you have not come to
grips with Jesus Christ and he has not yet got to grips with you in your heart.
I was trying to illustrate
this truth at the midweek evangelism course we have been doing with this rather
feeble diagram. That top line represents the visible surface of our lives, what
other people see. And the heart represents that part of our lives that is
hidden, the life no-one else sees.
The Christian life must
begin at that level. You can’t just
paint the surface a different colour and think that is the Christian Faith.
But, says James, what has
happened in the heart must also affect the surface. It has to begin in your and
my heart. But then it has to rise to the surface of our lives.
(b) The Use of the Bridle
Look again at verse 26: ‘If
anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his
tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.’ Again I’m
afraid I’m going to quibble with the translation there, because a tight rein is
literally a bridle. And we may misunderstand James’ picture, particularly if,
in our urban setting, we are not very familiar with riding, harness and horses.
The bridle is used for control and direction. It may be used at times to
check a horse’s speed, but it is also used to set its course. For those more
familiar with the internal combustion engine for their transport, it’s a
steering wheel as well as a brake, not just a brake. We do not put a bridle on
a racehorse in order to slow it down, but to keep it on the racetrack.
I’ve entitled this point the
Galloping Tongue and some of us may well acknowledge (as I have to do) that we
are motormouths, and that we talk too much; and that we would have fewer
regrets in life if we opened our mouths less often. But James is not just
concerned about us saying what we should not: gossip, indiscretion, libel,
slander, swearing, blasphemy, sarcasm, mockery, tittle-tattle, exaggeration,
foul jokes, the insensitive and unnecessary and hurtful word. One man said to
John Wesley, “My talent is to speak my mind.” Wesley replied, “That’s one
talent God would not care a bit if you buried.”
But it’s not just stopping
our tongues saying certain things: it’s also getting our tongues to say other
things – just as a bridle checks a horse in one direction and guides it into
another. Using the tongue to say, “Thank you,” (how many of us say that as
often as we should?); using the tongue to affirm, to encourage, to appreciate;
using the tongue to apologise (to God and to other people); using the tongue to
acknowledge Jesus Christ in our normal lives. Some of us say too much, but most
of us also say far too little. Moral courage is an underrated virtue in the
Church. It’s one of the things I pray especially for my children: that God will
give them courage to be known as Christians – at school, in college. It will
take courage to speak out wisely and sensitively, won’t it?
We are all so afraid of
being thought hypocrites that we have allowed the poor behaviour of our lives
to seal our lips. We need to open our lips, to acknowledge Jesus Christ and see
if that doesn’t affect our behaviour. Being known as a Christian on site, in
the shop, at the office, in the lab or the staff-room or the JCR or the library
or the sports field will have an electrifying effect on our behaviour there.
‘If anyone considers himself
religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself
[his
heart] and his religion is worthless’ (v. 26). It’s not just what we
don’t say; it is also what we do say. One man, on a church work party,
kept following the vicar, who was using
a hammer. Eventually the vicar asked him why he was keeping so close to him.
The man said, “I want to hear what you say when you hit your thumb.”
A faith that does not affect
our lips is worthless, according to James. But he also tells us that there is a
balance to be struck between the outward and the inward – our second point.
2) The Necessary Balance (v. 27)
‘Religion that God our
Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows
in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world’ (v. 27). James wrote in, and
for, a world where religion had a better press than it does among us today. To
be religious is hardly complimentary in 21st Century Cambridge. And
yet many of our contemporaries would acknowledge that there is more to life
than can be accounted for by the five human senses. The realm of the spirit is
not actually neglected and ignored today – almost every week I receive
publicity about some festival of mind and spirit, inner healing or psychic
transcending or something of that nature. But only Christianity offers this
perfect balance between the visible, material world and the unseen world of the
spirit hinted at here in verse 27: ‘… to look after orphans and widows in their
distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’ Let’s
look at the two halves of that verse.
(a) Caring for the Helpless
‘… to look after orphans and
widows in their distress …’ (v. 27b). We Christians must engage with the
world around us. We must be involved – but not in order to meet our own needs.
The world is not there for me to exploit, whether by material acquisition (the
ever rising standard of living) or to meet my psychological needs (for power,
for achievement, for popularity, for self-betterment, for love). The world is
there for me to serve and love others. Orphans and widows in the 1st
Century world, where there were no social services, where women and children
were seriously disadvantaged, were helpless. ‘And true piety helps the
helpless, for God is the God who secures the rights of those who have no hope’
(Davids). The problem with those psychic fairs and inner healing festivals is
that they are essentially self-centred. They do not focus on orphans and
widows. They focus on me, meeting my needs and being able to cope better with
my life.
Christians must be involved
with the world. The nature of God gives us no option about that – the God who
did not send donations or condolences or representatives, but came Himself in
the Person of His Son, and died in our place on the cross. We must be involved.
Mother Teresa spoke at the
National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, USA (I say, “Washington, USA,” not
because you might think it was Washington, Co. Durham, but just because the
Americans insist on saying, “London, England.”) She got on to the subject of
abortion, which was not completely tactful. It was a sensitive issue at a
high-profile, public gathering like that, and clearly some of her audience were
disconcerted by what she was saying. Then her little figure leaned forward
toward the microphone and she spread her arms wide and she said, “If you don’t
want the children, give them to me. I’ll take them.”
Christians must be involved.
It is not for me to tell you how or where; whether you should get involved in
this or that; support this cause or that cause; join this party or that party;
sign this petition or that. We do very little of that here at St Andrew the
Great. The Bible does not tell us ‘This is the cause you should espouse; this
is the political party to which you should
belong’. But it does tell us that we should be involved (and it does
tell us that we should not make a song and dance about it. Involvement, yes;
self-advertising involvement, no. One of the great joys of pastoral ministry is
discovering how deeply and how widely other Christians are involved in a huge
range of social, political and international concerns without making a big deal
of it, or telling all the rest of us we should have the same concerns.) God’s
word will drive all of us out into God’s world. I preach it with that
conviction. I am convinced that if I teach the Bible faithfully from this
pulpit, you, if you’re a believing Christian, will be involved with the world.
I don’t expect to know about it and I don’t expect to direct you in how you
should do it. It may be totally private. It may be in a way that is absolutely
peculiar to you. But I preach it with the conviction that it will do that in
your life and in my life, all the time.
But it will also make us
sensitive to pollution by the world.
(b) But Unstained
‘ … and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world’ (v. 27c). . Caring but
unstained – how rarely do we manage to strike that balance! Involved but
unpolluted – we topple over one way or the other. Some of us underestimate the
power of God to impact the present world order. So we keep ourselves to
ourselves and we leave the orphans and the widows to look after themselves.
Others of us underestimate the power of the god of this world to corrupt our
hearts and threaten our relationship with God. So we fling ourselves into good
works with no concern for the health of our own souls. We forget to pray, to
read the Bible and to meet with other Christians. And soon the world that we
are seeking to serve begins to set our agenda and to dominate our thinking. The
ship must be in the sea, it is true. But not the sea in the ship. (The
Christian must be in the world, but not the world in the Christian – or he/she
will sink without a trace.)
If we are to be unpolluted
by this world, we must keep proclaiming Christ to it. He alone is the Master of
the god of this world, and He alone can cleanse us from its pollution, because
He is the forgiver of sins. Christianity is the call to follow Jesus Christ,
who reconciles men and women to God. We will not do that without being both
involved and yet uncontaminated. Now don’t think, as I say it (and it is an
easy thing to say), that I think it is not difficult. It is hugely difficult to
get this balance right and there will not be one of us who can stand up in
church and say, “I’ve got the balance dead right in my life.”
Involvement with the world
and yet not polluted by it; involvement with helping people and yet at the same
time witnessing powerfully and clearly to them, the tongue used for Christ.
Let’s just read those verses
again: ‘If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight
rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion
that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after
orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by
the world’ (vv. 26, 27).
There is a story of a rather
strait-laced Presbyterian church in North America where a black man from the
south of the country turned up at one of their services. He was clearly used to
a rather different style of church meeting and was participating volubly in the
service as it went along. The service was punctuated with cries of: “Praise the
Lord!”, “Alleluia!” and “Amen” from this gentleman. This continued into the
sermon where regular: “I believe it!” and other such interjections were clearly
disconcerting the preacher somewhat. And so (as there would be here at St
Andrew the Great) there was a little gathering at the back of some of the
churchwardens, or rather elders and deacons it being a Presbyterian church, and
when the man suddenly let out a roar, “Preach it brother, preach it!” the
senior deacon was told it was his job to go and talk to him. So he sidled along
the pew and tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, but in
this church we don’t interrupt the preacher.” “But man,” said the visitor, “I’ve
got religion!” The deacon looked at him and he said, “Well, you didn’t get it
here. So shut up!”
I hope we have got religion
at St Andrew the Great – in the right sense. I hope that religion has affected
our speech. Our tongues are bridled, kept in check from saying what they
shouldn’t and directed to say what they should. And I hope as a church we are
involved in this world; that the orphans and widows of Cambridge know we’re
here and that we’re for them; and that we are doing all we can in that way while
keeping uncontaminated, unstained, unpolluted by this world order – which would
take us as far from God as it possibly could.
If that is not true of us, then we haven’t ‘got
religion’ – not in the sense that James means it – here at St Andrew the Great.