Simone Weil was a French Jewess who, in the opinion of Malcolm Muggeridge, was the most luminous intelligence of the twentieth century and who was reckoned by others to have had the most powerful mind of those in her generation. She was a Marxist who experienced Christ taking possession of her. Throughout her life she sought to close the gap between her beliefs and her life.
After completing her studies, instead of becoming an academic, as those with her abilities were expected to do, she began working on the production line of a factory to identify with working people. She later fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked on the land during World War II. Each of these decisions and actions affected her health and her life later ended because, while in hospital in England, she would only eat what those in the Resistance were able to eat and, as a result, starved herself to death. She has been an inspiration to many, partly for his writings but also for the committed, and even extreme, way in which she attempted to eliminate the gap between what she believed and how she lived.
That gap is there for all of us, which is one reason why it is so important that the letter from James, of which we have heard an extract this morning, is included in the Bible. James argues that if we allow the gap between what we believe and what we do to grow too great, then our faith is dead:
“Dear friends, do you think you'll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, "Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you?” “In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” (James 2. 14-17)
This letter is arguing that we must consistently re-examine the gap between what we believe and what we do in our lives because our tendency as human beings is to say the right things and then do something completely different. Our tendency can even be to deceive ourselves about the way that we live our lives. Church can be used as part of that process of deception so that, for example, we might subconsciously think that by coming to church – praying the confession, reciting the creed and so on – we have done our Christian duty and can therefore relax and be ourselves for the rest of the week before coming to church again to, in a sense, baptise our hypocrisy once again.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that this is a particular fault of people here at St Johns but I am saying that it is something that applies to some extent to all Christians. At the end of the day, we generally aren’t prepared to do what Simone Weil did and die for our beliefs. Some sort of gap always exists between the demands that our faith makes of us and what we are prepared to do. That what the letter of James points out and that is perhaps what Jesus was testing out in our Gospel reading when he was so awkward with the Phoenician women. What he discovered by way of his unhelpful and discouraging responses was that her faith was not just words but was real.
One way in which we are able to re-examine our lives and the extent to which we still need to marry up our faith and our lives is through Stewardship. In thinking about Stewardship we think about the way in which we use our time and talents for God, the extent that we give financially towards God’s work plus our involvement in the community and our care of the environment. Stewardship is about going through the self-examination process of which I have been speaking together and seeing what results. Let us pray for good results as each of us re-examine our lives and actions to ensure that our faith is not dead because it continues to result in action.
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Philip Bailey - I Am Gold.
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