Sermon 52 - Nothing more than ...
James 2:18 But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds." Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.
Proverbs 24:11-12 Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?
1 Corinthians 13:3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
A December episode of the Alberni Reach Podcast got a bit of interesting reaction.
I had been asked to talk about feelings. Nothing more than feelings. The person who made the suggestion to me didn't give any other details, other than that we should talk about feelings. And when I pursued the idea that we should maybe get a little bit more specificity on that, the only additional feedback that I got was that some people seemed to be big on feelings, and other people didn't. So, because of some related work in regard to emotions (and particularly the work that I have done in developing men's grief support), I figured that I could address that pretty easily.
And so I did, starting with the fact that our society, in general, seems to think that feelings, and emotions in general, are less important than rationality. Feelings have to be kept under control. We have to assess our emotions rationally, and then rationally decide on some course of action. There are, of course, those who disagree, and feel that feelings are important, and should be expressed, and even celebrated. But those people tend to be in something of a minority, and, in general, are disregarded by the people who run things in our society. In general, rationality is considered to be superior to emotion. Feelings are *mere* feelings, and nothing more. (That wasn't *all* we talked about, but that was where it started, and what's relevant to this piece.)
Which completely ignores the fact that, if we were all computers (or Vulcans) and were completely rational, and not distracted by our feelings, we would never actually *do* anything. Emotions, and feelings, are our drivers and motivators. We have just seen an election in the United States that proves this point, and we have seen recent elections in a number of parts of the world that prove this point, and we are facing an election, in Canada, which is undoubtedly going to be run completely on emotional lines. It's really interesting to live in a society that prides itself on its rationality, and is driving its "rationality" completely on its feelings of the moment.
But that's as may be. Following the recording of our podcast on feelings, I got, relatively quickly, two extremely interesting reactions. It is intriguing that, almost immediately, in our society that prides itself on rationality, and from people who obviously, verbally at least, are on the side of rationality, I got two, very similar, reactions that were completely irrational, illogical, and possibly even inherently contradictory. Having done the podcast, starting right off the top pointing out that we do need our feelings and emotions as motivators for any kind of action, I got one reaction that, while not challenging this point, completely illustrated it. The person, in commenting about feelings, immediately expressed the opinion that feelings were, in fact, a tool of the devil. Possibly not in those exact words, but the person was very concerned that our feelings and emotions were, most often, sent to us from God's adversary, in order to distract us from what God wants us to do or think. This would, of course, mean that feelings are completely untrustworthy, and should be ignored whenever possible. In other words, feelings bad, rationality good. Just the position that I had taken to task right at the beginning of the podcast.
And, shortly thereafter, I got another, very similar, reaction. This one, once again, didn't challenge the idea that we needed both emotion and rationality, but charged right into the idea that feelings were everything (and I mean *everything*) that was wrong with our society. People feel that they are the wrong gender, and therefore decide that they should switch. And therefore feelings are the cause of all the problems in our society, and, once again, feelings bad, rationality good. And I was struck, quite literally, speechless by this assertion. I couldn't even respond to point out the complete irrationality of this position. If someone decided to change gender based on mere feelings, nothing more than feelings, how could you ignore the *strength* of those feelings; the pain and the distress that must have driven someone to those feelings? Changing genders is not easy, even in our somewhat more liberal society. Changing genders in some societies will get you killed. But even in our society, you are going to encounter tremendous opposition. You are going to lose friends, and possibly family. You may lose your job. You will undoubtedly lose position and status in society. Changing genders cannot be easy. So how is it that you can possibly take the position that the feelings, that you want to change gender, are "mere" feelings; are mere emotionality; in light of the difficulties someone is going to encounter in trying to do it?
It was the irony of this fact; two champions of rationality, making two such similarly, and completely irrational statements; that struck me so forcefully. They both felt their positions so strongly that they were unable to see the irrationalities, and inherent flaws, in their positions.
Such a position is illogical ...
Now, I started all of this by saying that we need emotions. Our emotions are our motivators to actually *do* anything. But I am not, by saying that, saying that we do not need rationality. We definitely need rationality. When we have decided to do something, because of our emotions, we need to use our rationality to decide what to do. In fact, even before that, we need to use are rationality to determine whether our emotions are, in fact, correct. We human beings are pretty terrible at figuring out our emotions. Very often we don't know why we are feeling something. We don't know the reason behind what we are feeling, and so we don't know if what we are feeling is, in fact, valid. Not to say that our feelings are ever *in*valid, but we don't know, for certain, whether what we are feeling really justifies some course of action. As a matter of fact, very often we actually don't know what it is that we are feeling. I have, previously, given you the example of me being startled by a driver coming through the crosswalk that I'm in, when I had no idea that a car was around. Because the car is big and heavy and capable of moving very quickly, it could potentially be a danger to me. And so probably what I am feeling is fear. But the thing is, we do not like feeling afraid. Feeling afraid makes us appear to be weak. So we would rather have some other, stronger, emotion, such as anger. And the thing is, our bodies don't know the difference between fear and anger. Both of them increase our heart rate. Both of them drain the blood from our surface skin, pushing it into our muscles, or into our body core, either getting us ready to take some necessary action, or protecting us from possible danger. So, while the body does pretty much the same thing, regardless of whether you are feeling fear or anger, it's easy to confuse the two. And so when we come back to the situation of me in the crosswalk, my brain can very quickly convince me that what I feel is not fear, of the car, but rather anger, usually directed at the driver. And so even though my initial reaction was, actually, fear, almost instantly I switch over to acting out of anger. We don't even know what we're really feeling much of the time.
So, we need rationality possibly even to tell us what we're feeling. We definitely need rationality to tell us whether the strength of what we are feeling is justified by the action that prompted our emotion. And then we have to use rationality to figure out whether we need to take any action at all, and what the most appropriate action would be.
But, as I say, if all we do is sit around and analyze, we never actually do anything. We need the emotion to prompt us to take *some* action, to do *some*thing.
It's not a question of which should we choose: rationality, or emotion. We need them both. We have to have them both. Choosing one or the other gets us into trouble. And letting one take charge and constantly overrule the other also gets us into trouble. We need both. And we need balance.
But while all this is possibly interesting, let's bring it a little bit closer to home.
In the Christian life, we have a very similar kind of debate, and even battle, as in this fight over rationality and emotions. In the Christian life we often fight about which is more important: faith, or works.
And, once again, this is a situation where we cannot choose one or the other. Interestingly, while in our secular life, or what we might call our normal life, we feel that rationality is superior to emotion, in the Christian life very often we say that faith is far superior to works.
And I am pretty sure that, at this point, you can see that I am going to say that faith is more emotional, and that works are more rational, at least in terms of making a choice between them, or dividing topics up into similar areas. And, yes, I would say that faith is more emotional, and that works are more rational. But it's not a dichotomy. There isn't a strict dividing line. There can often be quite rational reasons for deciding to hold to a particular tenet of faith. We talk about proofs for the existence of God. Yes, this kind of discussion does mean that we are using rationality to support faith. But, as C. S. Lewis said, faith is when, once you have decided something, and you are faced with a difficulty that argues against that decision, you don't just flip flop. You hold to that decision until there is a very good reason to change your mind. God does not always give us a perfect, and enjoyable, life. Sometimes really terrible things happen to us. And this can challenge our faith either that God exists, or that God is good. So, you can say that the only time you are actually demonstrating faith, is when you are holding on to that belief in a good God, when really rotten things are happening to you. I've got a lot of experience there. So, I would say that faith, while it can have some rational basis, is more on the emotional side.
So that kind of puts works on the rational side. And, yes, works has more to do with deciding, after some analysis, what we should do in a given situation. Should we help this person? Well, faith tells us that, yes, we should help everybody, all the time. But, Jesus himself said that you have to do a bit of analysis. You have to give it some thought. Do you, in fact, have the resources to help? Do you, in fact, have the resources to take this course of action? You have to think about it. That's the rationality part. You also have to think about the effect on the other person. Is this person in trouble through no fault of their own? Or is this person in trouble because they have made a really, really bad decision? And, if we help them out this time, because they are in difficulty, because they made a really, really bad decision, does that mean that next time, they are likely to get themselves in trouble, because they are, once again, going to make a really, really bad decision, and they didn't have to face the consequences of that decision, because we helped them out?
And then we have to second guess our analysis that drew the conclusion that we don't have to help them, because they are in trouble, because of their own bad decisions. And we have to, rationally, figure out whether we made that decision, really, because we didn't want to commit our resources to helping them in the first place. In which case we are letting our emotions, and some pretty self-centered emotions at that, cloud our rational analysis, and our decision. And, once again, the fact is that works are not purely rational. They get affected by our emotionally as well.
But, overall, we can say that faith is closer to emotionality, and works is closer to rationality. And, in the end, it doesn't really matter. Because we can't choose one over the other. We can't just say, oh, I have faith! and everything else is fine. As James said, faith without works is dead.
That doesn't mean that faith has to be judged by works, and that therefore works holds the upper hand. As 1st Corinthians 13 tells us, works without faith is *equally* dead. Works without the love that needs to motivate the works, is futile. We need both. We cannot decide to go one way or the other. We cannot say that we are a loving and faithful community if, when someone who is suffering and disturbed, even if that suffering and disturbance is a result of many bad decisions of their own, and we do nothing to help them. And that means that we have to look at every single person who walks into our congregations, who walks into our churches, who simply walks across the field when we are attending the outdoor Summer Rain festival, we need to look at that person and figure out if they are in need. If they are in trouble. If we, personally, are not specifically qualified to address their need, we need to take some kind of steps to ensure that they do get the help, the support, the comfort that they might desperately need. We cannot say that we are a loving and faithful community, and simply ignore what is around us. That is not an option the Bible allows us. The Bible also says we cannot say we didn't know. We are responsible for rescuing those being led away to death.
Hold fast to your faith. But don't just hold fast to it, challenge it, with your rationality, so that you are always ready to make a defense of anyone who asks you. And remember that faith without words is dead.
Keep doing good works. Your works are what prove that you have faith. But simply doing works, good works, and especially demanding the evidence of good works in others, is not an option open to us. If we do all these great things, but we don't have love, we are nothing.
Hold fast to your faith. Use your works, your own works, as a metric of whether, in fact, you have faith and love. Your works are the proof of your love. You need both. You can't have either or.
We can't prefer faith simply because that lets us off the hook from helping that needy person. You cannot say, well, I believe in God, and if God wanted me to help that person, God would tell me to help that person! Did God tell you to have that cup of coffee this morning? Did God tell you to have eggs and bacon instead of oatmeal? Or the other way around? Did God tell you that you didn't need to gas up this morning, even though the tank is getting a little bit empty, and you're running a bit late. You believe in God. You have faith in God. Did it ever occur to you that God might be telling you to help that person, simply by letting you see that person?
And you cannot prefer works, because you can then not help that person because, after all, their trouble is a result of their own choices. They wouldn't be in the trouble that they were today, if they had made better choices, if they had been doing better works with their life up to this point. Yes, that is undoubtedly true. But it is also true that you are not perfect, and that the standard for admission to heaven and eternal life is, in fact, perfection. And yet God has given you resources, and sustenance, and comfort in this current life. And God has provided a way for you, even though you are not perfect, to enter eternal life in fellowship with him.
We need faith. Faith is what justifies us. But works point out that we are grateful for that justification, and we believe that God has justified us, and not through our works. But our faith, if it is only the faith that says, well I'm off the hook! that kind of faith is dead. It's useless. And what kind of faith is it that is not grateful for a gift like that?
We need both.
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