Doers of the Word

“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” So writes James the Apostle, in his letter found in the New Testament. What he means by this is that for faith to be real, it must be translated into deeds. As a preacher once said, it must be “tangiblized.” Otherwise, faith is just another form of self-deception. Just as inaction reveals the inner attitude, so too does action. Faith is not just a matter of the head and the heart, it is a matter of the hands as well.

We are a congregation peopled with those who are not mere hearers of the word, but who are also doers of the word.  Many of you do in a very important way – by tithing, by pledging, by sharing of your financial resources, you fund this church’s ministries here and beyond, where we are doers of the word. Money is ministry in this way, and don’t let anyone try to convince you otherwise.

            But we are also a congregation who are doers of the word in a very hands-on sense. Sometimes this is the case as you go about your daily lives, as you try to live for others as Jesus lived for us, living lives of compassion and caring and seeking justice and working for peace. And sometimes you do this sort of hands-on doing of the word together, working with others on a Habitat for Humanity build, or pitching in at the hospital or at A Baby Center in Hyannis. And sometimes you pick up and get on a plane and go to New Orleans for a week of rebuilding homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Just as Carol and Brad will share with you this morning….

            Carol and Brad told you about how they were doers of the word through their work for families seeking to rebuild their lives in New Orleans. We often tend to think of being doers of the word in just that sense, in the ways in which we reach out to help our neighbors. But I think there is another important way we can be doers of the word as well, and that has something to do with being intentional about working on our own stuff, about growing deeper in faith, about working towards bringing together our doing and our being.

            So for me, when we are off on a mission trip, part of my job, part of my being a doer of the word, is to help those on the trip figure this out as well. That is one of the reasons that we close each evening with an hour of shared reflection and worship. We talk about the events of the day, about the joys and the disappointments, about the highs and the frustrations, about the interactions we had with the locals, about what we had learned. We often find, at least early in the week, that we have more questions than answers, and then at times figure out that what we thought were the answers were simply doorways to more questions, and by the end of the week it turns out that we really had learned something new about ourselves. Let me share just two examples.

            Last year one of the work groups arrived on site only to find that they had hardly any of the tools they needed to get the work done. They ended up sitting around for about half the day, growing increasingly frustrated with the inability of the overseeing organization to get them the tools and materials. They shared that frustration in the evening meeting, each taking a turn going on about the lack of organization, bureaucratic red-tape, and so on. And then someone from another of the groups said, “Okay, now take that frustration you experienced for one-half a day, and think about how it must feel for folk who have been trying to get their homes rebuilt for over four years, and who keep running into delays from FEMA and insurance companies and shoddy contractors and on and on.” Whoa; big reality check; everyone felt just a little bit sheepish, just a little too entitled. Gave us all a lot to think about.

            A second example. This year, after our first day’s work, and one of the reflection circle had just finished gushing about how neat it was to meet one of the homeowners and spend some time talking with them. “Harrumph,” opined another member of our group, “I came down here to do work, and all this time chit-chatting just gets in the way of the work I am supposed to be doing. If I had my way, I would be like a fairy that just flits in, does the works, and gets out.” Not every one agreed, but I could tell a number of folk shared this sentiment. So at the close of the session, I said, “I wonder if we all might spend some time over the coming days thinking about just exactly what the work is that we are supposed to be doing down here.”

            Well, sure enough, when we gathered for our last time of reflection, everyone had thoughts on the work we were doing in New Orleans. They all agreed, of course, that we were there to help folk made homeless by a hurricane; but they also all got that we were there to work on ourselves as well.

We were there to learn more about the causes of what many thought was a natural disaster – but which was also a man-made tragedy, with components that included the man-made destruction of the protective delta marshes; the man-made construction of a canal which gave the floodwaters a straight-line path into Lake Ponchartrain; man-made faulty engineering of the levees; and a man-made federal blunder which caused tens of thousands of homeowners to cancel their flood insurance six months before Katrina, because they were told they no longer lived on a floodplain.

We were there to learn once again how much better it is to have wealth. We stayed in a church in the Uptown area of New Orleans, a fashionable district of beautiful, expensive homes – which was built on the high ground, and so was untouched by the flooding. While those who had relatively little lost everything, those with much were largely unaffected.

We were there to learn about gratitude – to learn once again how blessed we all are to have homes and not live in a FEMA trailer and not have to wonder if we might ever have a home again.

And we were there to reconnect in a new way with our faith. We were living out the parable of the Good Samaritan as we reached down to help those in need; we were talking with people who had lived through the agony of Good Friday and had been raised to new life; we were there to know again that faith, if it has no works, is dead. And that those who are doers of the word are, indeed, blessed in their doing.