Sermon for January 19th

This morning I share most of a sermon from Rev. Martin Luther King: entitled A religion of Doing: this message was delivered at Dexter Baptist Church in 1954. It is based on a sermon from Henry Fosdick “faith is a force not a form”.   Although it is based on a passage from Matthew 7, this is Martin Luther King’s vision of Jesus parable of the sower, the lesson being the seeds that land in good soil are the people with an active faith, who let God’s word and God’s grace shape them and their actions.    

In the seventh chapter of Matthew's Gospel we find these pressing words flowing from the lips of our Lord and Master: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my father which is in Heaven.”² In these words Jesus is placing emphasis on a concrete practical religion rather than an abstract theoretical religion. In other words he is placing emphasis on an active religion of doing rather than a passive religion of talk. Religion to be real and genuine must not only be something that men talk about, but it must be something that men live about. Jesus recognized that there is always the danger of having a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. He was quite certain that the tree of religion becomes dry and even dead when it fails to produce the fruit of action.

Let us turn for the moment to some of the truths implicit in our text which must forever challenge us as christians. The first truth implied in our text is that the test of belief is action. This is just another way of saying that a man will do what he believes and in the final analysis he is what he does. There can be no true divorce between belief and action. There might be some divorce between intellectual assent and action. Intellectual assent is merely agreeing that a thing is true; real belief is acting like it is true. Belief always takes a flight into action. The ultimate test for what a man believes is not what he says, but what he does. Many people, for example, say that they believe in God, but their actions reveal the very denial of God's existence. Indeed the great danger confronting religion is not so much theoretical atheism as practical atheism; not so much denying God's existence with our lips as denying God's existence with our lives. How many of us so-called Christians affirm the existence of God with our mouths and deny his existence with our lives. It causes many to wonder if we believe in God after all. And there is warrant for such a wonder. If a man believes that there is a God that guides the destiny of the universe, and that this God has planted in the fiber of the universe an inexorable moral law that is as abiding as the physical laws, he will act like it. And if he doesn't act like it all of his impressive eloquence concerning his belief in God becomes as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.³ Belief is ultimately validated in action. The ultimate test of a man's sincerity in crying Lord, Lord, is found in his active doing of God's will.

A second truth implied in our text is that real religion is not a mere form but a dynamic force. Now there can be no doubt that this is one area in which we have failed miserably. Dr. Moffatt's translation of that familiar passage in the second letter to Timothy is a true description of much of our conventional christianity. It reads: “Though they keep up a form of religion, they will have nothing to do with it as a force.  Certainly that describes many people. There are about 700,000,000 christians in the world today, and were Christ's faith and way of life a vital force in anything like that number, the condition of this world would be far better than it is. How much truth there is in the lines of a modern poet who speaks about our worshipping congregation: They do it every Sunday, They'll be all right on Monday; It's just a little habit they've acquired.

How much of our contemporary christianity can be described as a mere Sunday habit. To put it fugutively, christianity is not a garment that we wear in everyday life, but it is a Sunday suit which we put on on Sunday morning and hang up neatly in the closet on Sunday night never to be touched again until the next Sunday. We have a form of religion but have nothing to do with it as a force. As E. Stanley Jones put it, “innoculated with a mild form of christianity, we have become immune to the genuine article.”⁶ Yet if religion is to be real and genuine in our lives it must be experienced as a dynamic force. Religion must be effective in the political world, the economic world, and indeed the whole social situation. Religion should flow through the stream of the whole {of} life. The easygoing dicotymy between the sacred and the secular, the god of religion and the god of life, the god of Sunday and the god of Monday has wrought havoc in the portals of religion. We must come to see that the god of religion is the god of life and that the god of Sunday is the god of Monday.

One of the things that prevents the church from being the dynamic force that it could be is the deep division within. We argue endlessly over creeds and ritual and denominationalism while the forces of evil are marching on. My friends the forces of evil in the world today are too strong to be met by isolated denominations. We must come to see that we have a unity of purpose that transcends all of our differences and that the God whom we serve is not a denominational God. When we come to see this we will meet the forces of evil, not with a mere form, but with strong organized forces of good. Let it not be said that we have a form of religion but have nothing to do with it as a force. {Quote Shakespeare Othello}

A final truth implied in our text is that we must never substitute esthetics for ethics. As Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick has said, “There are two sets of faculities in (all of) us, the esthetic and the ethical—the sense of beauty and the sence of duty—and Christ appeals to both.”⁷ And there is the ever present danger that we will become so involved in singing our beautiful hymns about Christ and noticing our beautiful architecture and ritual, that our religion will end up in emotional adorations only, saying, “Lord, Lord!” What we are seeing in our world today is countless millions of people worshipping Christ emotionally but not morally. The white men who lynch Negroes worship Christ. The strongest advocators of segregation in America also worship Christ. Many of the greatest economic exploiters worship Christ. Much of the low, evil and degrading conditions existing in our society is perpetuated by people who worship Christ. The most disastrous events in the history of Christ's movement have not come from his opposers, but from his worshippers who said, “Lord, Lord!”

My friends may I say that a Christianity that worships Christ emotionally and does not follow him ethically is a conventional sham. Let us be well assured amid our beautiful churches, and our lovely architecture, that Christ is more concerned about our attitude towards racial prejudice and war than he is about our long processionals. He is more concerned with how we treat our neighbors than how loud we sing his praises. Christ is more concerned about our living a high ethical life than our most detailed knowledge of the creeds of christendom. Not every one, not anyone, who merely says, “Lord, Lord!” but he that doeth the Father's will!

The sermon ends with a story borrowed from Howard Thurmann of a fictious town where no one wears shoes, where everyone thinks shoes are great, where people powerfully and poetically talk about the greatness of shoes, where they have built giant factories to make shoes but no one does. When asked whats going on, everyone simply says “that’s just it, why don’t we”.

As we think about Jesus paraables of the sower, we get a clear image of what the seeds of faith that are thriving looks like and what the seeds of faith that are dying in the thorns looks like