The Law of Liberty

Sermon prepared for Messiah Lutheran Church, Auburn WA

By Gregory S. Kaurin, pastor

8/31/03

text: James 1:17-27 & Mark 7:1-13

Sermon—

Hearers of the Word: Just Do It!

I’m going to teach you three Greek words that will help you understand the Letter of James. If you grow to understand these three words, and how they apply to your life as a Christian, you may understand this letter of James better than most of the preachers, scholars, and theologians that Christianity has ever produced.

Here’s the first Greek word: nomos. It means, “law.” Next, eleutherias; that means, “liberty” or “freedom.” And last: teleios; it means, “the end, finished, complete, perfected.” It’s related to the last word Jesus used on the cross, “It is completed, finished.”

And this is how James put those words together in chapter 1, verse 25:

Those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing. …nomos teleion, ton tais eleutherias…

“nomos teleion, the law complete or perfected, ton tais eleutherias, that is of liberty”; in other words, the law that is perfect, the law that completes or defines all law, is the law of liberty.

So, what is this “Law of Liberty”? James explained it in the second chapter of his letter, but you need to read carefully. He wrote these words:

So speak & so act as those who are about to be judged by the law of liberty; for judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

nomos eleutherias, most people get the idea that we should be humbled by this passage. “God’s judgment is just around the corner,” James said, but he didn’t stop there. “So speak and so act like people who will be judged by the nomos eleutherias, the law of liberty, the law of freedom. And then he described what that law is about. It’s about mercy. Speak and act like people who are about to be judged by… mercy. Speak and act like people who have been shown more mercy than any one of us deserves.

So tell me, if you have been shown lots of mercy—how should you speak and act toward others? That’s the Law of Mercy. James called it the Law of Liberty because God’s mercy frees people, it forgives us, and it calls us to do the same for others.

James is the one who wrote the well known words that “Faith without works is dead” (2:17,26). Some are confused by these words, since almost seem to contradict the message that we preach over and over, that we are not saved by our works. We are saved only by God’s free grace and forgiveness. In his letters, St. Paul wrote numerous times that our faith and salvation is not based on our works, but on God’s grace alone.

The only difference is what James and Paul each meant by the word “works.” Paul was talking about works in terms of credit. Your works do not give you credit into heaven. What James meant by works were fruits or results of faith, like kindness, and generosity.

If your faith doesn’t produce love and works of love, then both Paul and James would tell you that you’ve got problems. Your works certainly don’t get you into heaven, but if no good works come out of your faith, then you are not living the new life that God has given to you.

In that famous passage from Paul’s “Love Chapter,” Paul said exactly the same thing as James when he wrote:

I may have faith, so as to move mountains, but if I have no love to show for it, I am nothing! (1 Cor. 13)

Faith, real faith, is a life that receives constant forgiveness and also reflects, or gives out, forgiveness to others. We receive mercy, and we offer mercy. We hear the gospel and we want to spread the gospel. Having been invited here to church and to Christ’s table, now our goal is to invite others.

That’s what Jesus was trying to get across to the Pharisees and religious leaders. They were constantly ridiculing him for working on the Sabbath, or eating with ritually unclean hands.

In our gospel lesson, there was that strange passage about “Corban.”

If anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have received from me is Corban,’ (that is, an offering to God)…you make void the word of God through your tradition. Mark 7:11-13

People were constantly worried about defining the extent and limits of the law. Trying to find out what they could get away with. Trying to find out what condemned others. But, think about this, if you only study and interpret God’s word in order to figure out what you can or can’t do in life, or to find out which kinds of people God condemns, are you living and acting out of love and mercy, …or out of selfishness?

There was this nifty way that kids were getting out of supporting their parents. They would go to the religious leader and have their estates declared as Corban—dedicated to God. That didn’t mean you had to give it up right away. You could continue to enjoy it and use it for the rest of your life. But finally, after you died, whatever was left would then go to the Temple. And since God was the one who decided how long you would live after declaring your property, then God was the one was deciding how much of the property he actually wanted. (It’s kind of like taking all the money you have, throwing it up in the air, and telling God, “Keep whatever you want—and I’ll just use whatever you let fall back to the ground.”)

But then these young whippersnappers would turn to their dear aging parents and say, “If you come into my house and use my resources, you would be taking what would have otherwise gone to God. I can enjoy it, but you would be stealing from God.”

Some lenders, especially if they felt a debtor was probably not going to pay up, would declare the debt as “Corban” and turn it over to the Temple. Now, the debtor no longer owed the lender, but God, and many would feel that dying with that kind of debt was especially and eternally dangerous. It was a great source of income for the Temple, even if the debtors only made partial payments. The lender could claim it as a donation to God, but at the eternal guilt and expense of all their debtor.

What Jesus was saying is that you cannot use God or pretended generosity as excuses to be unmerciful, condemning or unkind, and then to pretend that it is still worshipping God. Mercy is the central law.

All of us need incredible amounts of mercy from God. So when we stand before God, with our lives completely exposed, we will find that none of us are entirely aware, or completely repentant of all our sins. We will all need more mercy than anyone of us deserves.

That is exactly what God has promised in the Law of Liberty. As a direct result, we need to be ready to extend the same mercy to others.

I think James Moffat was right on when he said in his commentary that:

A teacher or preacher may give an eloquent study or sermon on the gospel…but when the sermon is done, it is not done; something remains to be done by those who heard it.

God’s goal does not stop at our salvation. We have been shown this mercy for a reason. The reason is simple and basic. We have been saved so that we can share our experiences of God’s mercy and love with others.

In verse 27, James wrote that: “Religion that is pure and undefiled…is this: care for orphans & widows in their distress.” James meant it literally and broadly: how we care for lonely and grieving and hurting people—both in and outside of our church and faith—is an indicator of how committed we are to unconditional mercy.

And he finished by writing, “Keep yourself unstained by the world.” Some people have interpreted this as a purity command. “Don’t get stained; don’t have impure thoughts.” But if you keep his Law of Liberty central in your mind, it changes the entire mood of the letter.

It’s true that James preached vehemently against gossip and bitter arguments. He preached against jealousy, playing favorites, being judgmental and greed. And he preached against using others sexually or otherwise for the mere self-gratification. —If he were here today, he would preach specifically against things like pornography, prostitution, child and spousal abuse, sleeping around, and adultery.

But why? Not just because these things are icky or against God’s written code. James, Paul and Jesus preached against all of these things because, and only because, these things are not merciful; they are not loving.

“Keep yourself unstained by the world.” That also means that there are powers in the world that work against this Law of Liberty and Mercy. These are the attitudes that stain and defile Christianity and make it look horrible.

Impatience. If you’ve ever met an impatient Christian, then you know what I mean.
Or, someone who comes across as judgmental? “When bad Christians happen to good people,” that’s the title of a great book. These are the Christians who ruin evangelism for everyone else. Sometimes the people who try to be religious, faithful pure, are actually the most staining themselves with impatient and unkind judgmentalism. It’s a horrible and stifling way to live!
Hopelessness and
fearfulness. These things doubt the strength of God’s mercy.
Arguments. How often our churches are sure that we need to argue and define, and worry this thing out, until we split and divide ourselves once again. The Law of Liberty and Mercy says that we have more important things to be doing saying to others than trying to define one sin from another.
Arrogance and
self-pity—both are self-focused, preventing us from really feeling God’s presence or sharing it with anyone.
Stinginess. It keeps us from sharing. When we give away, we don’t actually lose what we give, we’ve simply expanded our reach to include others. That’s really what this whole Law of Liberty is about. To share what we’ve been given, and in so doing, we will experience and expand the merciful presence of God even further.

So, don’t be stained by the world. The world will tempt you to be cynical and impatient, frustrated and hopeless, self-focused, argumentative and stingy. But giving into that is forgetting who we are and what God has done for us. We are children of God, marked by salvation, and marked for a purpose.

Don’t forget that. Let God’s love and mercy so fill you up to the point that you no longer know, for sure, just how far God might be willing to extend his grace and salvation. Enjoy your Christianity so much that you want to share it. This news of God’s mercy is too good to keep to yourself.

I want to finish by passing onto you what Pastor Eric and Svava Sigmar told me about their experience a couple weeks ago in Canada. They were at the gathering of the Lutheran World Federation. There were Lutheran representatives from all manner of places and countries. One that really caught their attention was the Lutheran representative from Papua New Guinea… that island north of Australia. When you think of Lutherans, Papua New Guinea is not the first place that comes to mind.

I checked the census numbers on this. They project that there are 815 thousand members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea. That may not seem like much to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s 5 million and some people, but it is a huge number when you realize that all of Papua New Guinea only holds 5 million people. It’s even more amazing when you realize that in the mid-seventies, about the time Papua New Guinea claimed independence from Australia, there were only about 100 thousand Lutherans.

How have they done it? They have multiplied their Lutherans eight times and are still growing today. The pastor from Papua New Guinea told Pastor Eric and Svava that they make it clear to their members that every one of them is a missionary. Every one of them is responsible to share the news, and to invite others.

I am here to tell you the same, exact thing. Every Christian is a ‘missionary’ – we all have a mission. It is to display, to describe and to invite others to experience God’s Law of Liberty as we have experienced it: when we’ve experienced it, how, and where they can go to hear more.

Maybe we haven’t been clear enough in the past. Let me be clear now. You are a missionary wherever you are. It is the nature of being Christian. You have heard the message of God’s mercy and your salvation, but that message does not stop here. That would be like briefly looking at your reflection here in these Baptismal waters, and then walking away and immediately forgetting what you saw there, and who you are.

A teacher or preacher may give an eloquent study or sermon on the gospel…but when the sermon is done, it is not done; something remains to be done by those who heard it (James Moffat).

Amen.