Emmanuel United Methodist Church

Rev. Stephanie Vader 

The French anthropologist and theologian Renè Girard coined the phrase mimetic desire to suggest that we learn to desire certain things by imitating the desire of others. Place two small children in a room with a toy neither have seen. One child begins to play with the toy. Suddenly, the other child wants the toy too. His desire is sparked by the other child’s interest. Or open a shop that sells coffee with foam on top that no one has ever seen before. A few people line up to buy it as the latest thing, and suddenly forty million formerly black-coffee drinkers are willing to pay six bucks for a venti cup of latte.

       So we know how we learn to covet certain objects. But how do we learn to live as Christ’s disciples? Where does the desire to live the Christian life come from? In his letter to the early Christians, James insists that Christian faith is simply incompatible with certain behaviors and attitudes. We can’t profess faith in Christ if we treat the poor with disdain. James is not subtle, he doesn’t mince words he says: What good is it…if you say you have faith, but do not have works?  Be doers of the word, not merely hearers.

       So which comes first, belief or practice? Do we learn what it means to be a Christian, and then learn to live as one? That’s the way most have understood it. We learn about Jesus’ concern for the poor and the outcast, and that motivates us to act in similar ways. Theologian Miroslav Volf suggests instead that more often than not, it is the other way around. That is, we learn what it means to live as Christians by participating in certain practices, and only later fully come to understand the teachings that undergird them.

       He tells the story from his own childhood in Yugoslavia where his father was pastor of a small Pentecostal church. There was a man who came from a neighboring village where there were few Christians, and among those few, no Pentecostalists. So each Sunday, following worship, his parents would invite the man to Sunday dinner, so that he did not spend his Sunday meal alone. As a child, he resented the man’s intrusion. Volf writes,

       “A rough-hewn figure, both intriguing and slightly menacing, he would sit quietly, a bit hunched, at the table opposite me... A moustache that put Nietzsche’s to shame dominating his face. I resented his coming, for when he entered our house my memory would always play back a sound from his previous visit. The sound was that of my mother’s soup... leaping noisily across the gap between his spoon and his mouth through his moustache.”

       What he learned, even from an early age, was that there was a direct relationship between his parents’ hospitality at their family table and the hospitality of the Lord’s table when they celebrated communion each Sunday during worship. As Volf puts it, “The circle of our table was opened up by the wounds of Christ, and a stranger was let in.” Of course, Volf did not come to such a sophisticated understanding until years later. But in all his studies of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper over all those years, his mind returns, again and again, to those Sunday dinners and his parents’ hospitality to the stranger with the rather rude table manners.

       Or, to put it still another way, we learn to desire the Christian life because someone first modeled it for us in an attractive way.

            When I read this text from James I think about Eloise and Paul Craig, members of the church I pastored in Shady Side Maryland.  Eloise and Paul were “doers of the word in ways I’ll not forget.”

Eloise and Paul had five children, one of whom was hit and killed by a drunk driver as he walked home one day from middle school.  That was almost 40 years ago but Eloise and Paul still think about Thomas every day. 

And when Eloise heard that the mother of the drunk driver who killed Thomas had cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy, Eloise made her chicken soup every Thursday for weeks and delivered it to her along with fresh flowers from her garden. 

In a time when many preach about a God who is tyrannical and punishing, what kind of God do you suppose Eloise Craig believed in?

I remember the Sunday when three year old Jeffrey Vitkun flushed Katie Cattertons teddy bear down the toilet.  Needless to say, it caused Katie considerable trauma, not to mention a flooded floor.

Well, Eloise and Paul Craig stayed out of worship that morning. Paul somehow retrieved the bear by removing the toilet. Then he mopped the floor while Eloise rushed home to wash and dry the furry bear.  So the toilet was functional and Katie had her bear by the closing benediction of worship.

Might you call that evangelism.  Not the kind that shouts, not the kind of the zealot who claims to know the mind of God.  But evangelism as a simple, humble living and doing of an extravagant love of life and people and children and teddy bears….

When the Metropolitan Community Church of the Chesapeake needed a place to hold their worship services while they raised money to build their own sanctuary Paul and Eloise where at the Administrative Council meeting when we discussed hosting them.  After some heated discussions about welcomcing a congregation to use our building that openly welcomed gay and lesbians, Paul said, “This is a church.  It says on our sign out front “All are welcome here” and the day that is not so is the day we take Jesus’ name off the sign.”

That ended the discussion.  And I noticed that Paul and Eloise went to worship services for the first month at the Metropolitan Community church of the Cheapeake, they told me they wanted to make sure that the folks in that community felt welcomed.

faith by your works, James wrote to the new community called the church.  And he didn’t mean that faith is something you earn by hard work.  He meant that there is a seamless unity to believing and doing.  Some people get all confused by James’ letter they think he is suggesting that we are saved by our good works. He is not saying that.  It’s not our words or our actions that set us right with God. God does that for us. But if we seek to be followers of Christ, we cannot remain indifferent to human need. What we say and what we do must fit together hand in glove. The lesson for me is that often we act our way into right thinking, as much as think our way in to right acting.

Let’s try an experiment. Think for a moment about someone who modeled the Christian faith for you. It could be a parent or grandparent, a Sunday school teacher, a pastor, a friend, perhaps even a member of this congregation. Who was the person, or persons, in your life that modeled for you most clearly how the Christian life is to be lived? Think for a moment about who that person was, or is, and share just for a moment with your neighbor how their example shaped your own life.  And if you neighbor in the pew is your spouse find someone else to share with. 

There is no mystery to this scripture from James.  But living our faith is easier said than done – living out each day what we proclaim here, what we sing and pray here.  You know that.  I know that.  God knows that.

Maybe though, it might help this week to think about Paul Craig.  Because this afternoon he will be serving at the soup kitchen located in the UMC in Tennessee where he moved after Eloise died.  Paul and Eloise did something to serve someone else every Sunday of their 52 years of married life.  Because as they would tell me, that’s just what you do when you believe in a God of such Great Love.