How to Transform Camden County with a Lived Sermon

The best sermons are lived rather than preached. Talk is cheap. Concrete actions are real. It’s that simple.

Don’t tell me what you believe about God, tell me about how you live your life and I will tell you about what you believe. This is street-level theology.

Theology just means “what we think about God.” So your own theology is what you think is true of God. Common theological statements are things like, “I believe God is always present, all knowing and all powerful.” Or “I believe that Jesus is God’s son and through faith in him, I can have forgiveness of sins and eternal life.”

You can say that you believe that God loves everyone and that Christians should share the love God has shown them. But how do you put those beliefs into practice?

I don’t write this to beat up on you or anyone else gentle reader. I do think there are some very important ways in which we in Camden County get this right. If you don’t think so, imagine our community without any churches or church sponsored agencies. What would happen if we didn’t exist?

Food banks and clothing banks would disappear. When someone’s house burned, who would provide for immediate needs before the insurance kicked in? Who would help when there was no insurance on the burned house?

A lot of the direct financial aid would vanish like the money that keeps on the lights after a job loss or pays for diapers for the child of a single mom who can’t find work. Sure there would be some state-sponsored assistance and perhaps some secular sources of assistance. But these only go so far. Here in Camden County, as in many places, it is the churches that provide for some very real needs.

And this is to just consider issues related to money. I also know that it is in response to God’s love that many come to stand alongside a child going through the court system as a CASA volunteer. Others hold the hand of the dying through Hospice. While others work through no agency, but show God’s love in visiting a nursing home or a sick acquaintance in the hospital.

It is in these ways that our faith is put into action and our love is made real. This is what the Book of James tells us is so important.

Jesus half brother James never had faith during Jesus’ own lifetime. A faithful Jew, James could not see Jesus as the Messiah until a post-resurrection appearance. This transformed James, who became a leader of the church in Jerusalem and was then put to death for his conviction that Jesus was the Christ, God’s anointed one.

In the book of the New Testament authored by James we find, “What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,’ and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?” (James 2:14-16).

James is convinced that faith that doesn’t result in actions is no faith at all.

A week from today, Habitat for Humanity will dedicate the House of Learning, paid for in part by a fundraising initiative through the Camden County School System. I worked on building the house one day last month with pastor’s and other church leaders from around Camden County.

As Christian leaders, we know that our mutual love of Jesus Christ and the desire to serve him draws us together more than denominational differences divide us. But it is good not just to know that, but to live into that reality by working together and eating together as we did that day at lunch.

We'll get a chance for more of this as Camden County churches are working together to raise the money and build a house early in 2007 as The Apostles’ Build, with 12 churches working as one on a Habitat House. That house will be yet another outward and visible sign that we Christians are one as we serve the same Lord, Jesus.

There is much more that we can do together. In fact, this one house only shows how great the need is. For a dozen families recently qualified for a house through Habitat, but only three could be selected, as that is how many houses Habitat can build in the short run.

If we could build 10 Habitat houses this week, there would be 10 families in need who could qualify for the house, who would work to build it and who would pay back the cost through the no-interest loan Habitat offers. But Habitat doesn’t have the funds to reach everyone. Just as no church can assist every family in need who comes to their door searching for help with rent, or an electric bill, or gas money for the car as they search for work.

The needs are greater than the resources. But rather than focusing on that reality, we would do our faith more credit to dream as God dreams, seeing that working together, we can accomplish much more. What if we had a central agency, represented by all churches, that worked to provide the direct needs for the community. No duplication of effort and a more efficient use of resources would help us reach more people.

I could go on, but you get the idea. We Christians are already doing much to make Camden County a better place and in doing so we preach about what we believe about God more effectively than any sermon. And to the degree we join together, celebrating that which unites us, we will all the more show our neighbors the love God has shown us.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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