Gimme That Real Religion

Text: James 1: 17-27

      Richard Rohr, author of the book we’ll be reading for our October book study, says “real religion” doesn’t force us into oppositional thinking.  The writer of James, the New Testament epistle we will be reading over the next couple of Sundays, also rejects the religious tendency toward dualism and judgmentalism by emphasizing proportion, pacing, and paradox.  James says, for instance:

         Speak. Just be readier to listen.

         Be angry. But don’t get there too quickly. 

         And when you do, hold together both your anger at injustice to the orphans and widows as well as your compassion for even the perpetrators of injustice. Otherwise, you’re deceiving yourself about what kind of religion you have.  Because if your religion causes you to hate anyone, then you have been stained by the world’s ways.  

         Real religion doesn’t polarize.  It "paradoxizes." It helps us respond proportionately, with the right pace, with room for paradox.  Even Jesus became angry at injustice. Sure, it’s easier to list the good guys and bad guys, the dos and don’ts. It’s easier, for instance, either to take a vow of total silence or to speak without any restraint.  We can’t deny the necessity of categories like good and evil, right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, creative and destructive.  But James tells us not to let simplistic labels rush us into reactivity or extremism. And experience tells us that traces of goodness hide in the meanest person you know, while the best of saints are flawed. We have peered into our own souls and seen, stirred together, a gumbo of vice and virtue. Real religion doesn’t stop us from taking action and making strong stands. But it does slow us down enough to see things more complexly and to gaze into the mirror with honesty.  Recognizing paradox, refusing to force others into neat compartments, sometimes points us to the Really Real.  

         I’m especially interested in the way today’s scripture brings together the actions of hearing and doing.  A religious experience for some is all about hearing the Voice of God within or from religious authorities.  Others lead a religious life by doing good deeds.  But the book of James assumes that people who follow Jesus are hearers and doers, they both commune spiritually and act politically and socially; they withdraw from the world and they engage in the world.  In fact, Open Table’s mission statement tries to capture that feature of Christian faith:  we follow Jesus through spiritual and social transformation. We do both inner and outer work.  In fact, we believe the spiritual is the social and the social is the spiritual. We pray/think/reflect AND we do/engage/act and we don’t so much alternate prayer and action as we combine them. Prayer or meditation or thoughtful examination should both precede and follow and be all mixed up with our actions.*  Real religion is not simply about prayers on Sunday and good works on Monday. Action and prayer become recursive and mutually supportive. James says, “Be doers of the word . . .not merely hearers who deceive themselves” (1:22). 

         “Gimme that ol’ time religion,” an old Gospel song pleads, because what was “good enough for grandma” is “good enough for me.”  But unreflected religion is not real. Real religion invites us to bring our encounters with a hurting world into this place to shape our prayers, change our hearts and our opinions, and help us hear where we should join God at work in the world. Real religion then uses us as God’s hands and feet in the world as we continue reflecting honestly, prayerfully on our experiences that teach our spirits and adjust our future actions.

         One of the earliest documents we wrote together as a new faith community was a list of principles to guide our service to others and commitments to global issues. (http://opentableucc.org/serving-the-community/)  In this document we pledge “to serve others as a recursive spiritual practice that stems from and leads to theological reflection and discerning prayer.”

         As we anticipate our quarterly responsibility to host homeless families through Family Promise this Tuesday evening, let’s recall those other principles as one way of reflecting before acting. 

1.   Our guidelines begin by saying we commit to see “Christ in those whom we serve as well as being Christ to those whom we serve.”  I grew up in loving, well-intentioned churches that saw their goal as bringing Christ to poor, benighted souls.  The missionaries we supported with our money and the mission trips we took as young people assumed that we possessed a crucial Truth other people were lacking.  That is not Open Table’s premise. We assume God is already at work in the world—long before we arrive on the scene.  In fact—and to be very blunt—God’s ways may be more in evidence in the lives of those we’ll help shelter Tuesday night than in our own lives.  We don’t claim to own the Truth about God. We don’t even claim to share identical beliefs within this congregation. Therefore, we don’t seek to impose our beliefs onto others.  While we hope the families we meet Tuesday night will glimpse something of Jesus’ love in us, we expect they will help deepen our experiences of God. That should shift our attitude from missionary (in its traditional connotations) to friend. 

2.   Which leads to our next guiding principle.  We partner with those we serve in “relational, respectful, and mutual” ways. We try to be good neighbors to folks we meet through Family Promise. Our agenda is not to save someone’s soul but to be a friend, a friend hosting a dinner. Of course that doesn’t mean we pretend to be instant buddies with strangers.  We respect their privacy and, should we meet these families later in another situation, we maintain that privacy. We are friends, but we are also hosts, so we might offer a harried mother some help feeding her baby in the high chair, as Linda T. did at a previous Family Promise night.  Fundamentally, we will be sharing a meal with some folks who’ve had a hard day, maybe a hard year. This Tuesday we will sensitively listen for cues as to how we might make this one night a little easier for three families.

3.   Our guidelines also encourage us to seek ways to be in sustainable places of service, not to simply parachute in with a one-time action or a not-well-considered donation. We hope to come alongside others to empower them.  We also hope to learn from ongoing relationships and projects that we help develop and improve upon.  Serving others is the chief curriculum of the church. While we may never see again the families we meet this Tuesday, we nevertheless are in an ongoing relationship with Family Promise.  We have in the past noted ways that organization can improve its good services to others.  Thanks to your attentiveness, Mary’s leadership, and Family Promise’s openness, some of our suggestions have been implemented.  We have not merely acted; we’ve reflected. 

4.   Open to fresh understanding and new relationships with diverse people, we try to LISTEN humbly to others, as the book of James advises. We will sit at tables Tuesday night not to entertain one another—though we always enjoy the conversations.  But we can be there to listen if someone needs to talk.  It’s a special gift to a spiritual community when the folks we listen to differ from us because we have a chance to see life afresh when we talk with folks who are different from us.  Do you know one reason we needed to become an Open and Affirming congregation?  Not simply to provide LGBT folks with a faith community that explicitly says you are welcome here and loved just as you are.  We needed it for our sake, gay and straight, because the LGBT community, in this time and place is, unfortunately, often marginalized and demeaned, which means that’s a sure place to find God’s spirit at work.  The Spirit moves on the margins. Think about the civil rights movement.  The Spirit was working and leading there well in advance of the mainstream Church.  If you want to follow the Spirit of Love, then move to the margins.  Go to a rally for immigration justice in Alabama and tell me if you can’t recognize the Spirit of God there.  Have dinner Tuesday night with families living one week at one church and one week at another and listen for God.  Let’s not romanticize others.  These families will not necessarily tell us sweet stories about miracles God is doing in their lives.  They may or may not be people of faith.  But you will recognize God’s movement in some small gesture, some fresh word that seeps into your soul, some heroic act written on a very small and human scale.

5.   Finally, our service through Family Promise will give us regular opportunities to think systemically.  We have committed to maximize our efforts by making sure our gifts, experiences, and passions match up to the community needs we hope to address. We must continue to ask: Does Family Promise continue to be a place where our gifts and the community’s need meet?  We have committed to examining root causes of problems in our community to respond not just with aid but also advocacy and empowerment.  Does Family Promise give us a way to work for justice rather than simply offering charity? 

         It is your responsibility and mine to engage in actions with commitment—and yet (here’s another paradox!) hold that commitment lightly enough that we can critique it for improvements and even move on to other avenues of service as needed.  It’s your role to suggest, as you feel led, new opportunities for service—and then step up to lead us there.  Some churches have been doing the same community outreach projects for years, never asking if they are making an impact or if they are themselves growing from the experience.  Right now, as a new church, we are “building this plane while we’re flying it.”  I’ll be glad when this plane gets built. But even then, let’s not rely on autopilot. 

         The more we think of our worship service and our service to others as the warp and woof of our faith fabric, the more beautiful that fabric will be.  Are we seeing social and spiritual transformation as one?   If we are not intentionally journeying inward while reaching outward, we can do more harm than good.

         Research has shown, for instance, that students doing community service without guided opportunities to reflect critically on that service can end up objectifying the people they serve and misunderstanding the problems they are hoping to address. Without a chance to process the community service experiences, some people never develop what one researcher calls “social imagination” to allow them to “critically question a world that [can otherwise seem to them] natural, inevitable, given” (Hertzberg).  I would call this ability to question the world critically an act of faith, a gift of the prophetic imagination. Research also warns that doing service without critical reflection can lead to despair and helplessness. Caring volunteers can feel overwhelmed by the problems they are trying to address. However, carefully processing service experience can actually empower volunteers and give them ways to “frame the nature of the problem” for constructive responses (Giles and Eyler 102).

         If it’s important that our service to others forms us in healthy ways, it’s also important that our service to others is genuinely helpful.  Without research, respect, and reciprocity, we risk offending those we hope to serve with paternalistic attitudes or ineffective solutions. Riding into the community on the white charger of good intentions is often not salutary.  One reason we donate offerings through our denomination for disaster relief, advocacy, and social action of all types is because the United Church of Christ has a track record for smart, respectful, non-coercive, culturally sensitive practices with people we serve.

          But you and I need to be doing hands-on work, too.  So let’s remember that intending to do good is not good enough. We’re not serving at Family Promise to feel smug about our goodness or grateful someone else has it worse than we do.  Instead, let’s consider both the real good that we can do and the real motivations behind our actions.  When we look into the mirror that might reflect our prejudices, our privilege, our pride, our complacency, our fears—let us not walk away with all those things still intact. 

         In our private prayer life and in times for congregational reflection, let us be honest so that our religion can be real. Thanks be to God that we can be hearers and doers.

* My emphasis on action and reflection (which I often translate as prayer) is influenced by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Freire, especially Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and from the scholarship of Service Learning that shaped my teaching of college students years ago.

Eyler, Janet and Dwight Giles.  Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning.  San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1999.

Herzberg, Bruce. “Community Service and Critical Teaching.” College Composition and Communication 45(1994): 307-319.