“But First, Let’s Pray”
James 5:13-20
James 5:16: Therefore
confess your sins to one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and
effective.
[prayer]
One of the first lessons I had to learn when I was doing clinical pastoral
education was that there’s a major difference between being healed and being
cured. People dying of cancer and other
diseases, with no hope of remission, often experience healing. Although their diseases aren’t cured they can
still experienced spiritual and emotional healing.
Many are able to put aside old hurts and thus experience reconciliation
with long-estranged loved ones and friends.
Hurts are both confessed and forgiven.
People long estranged from the Lord are able to surrender themselves to
his gracious, merciful, and loving will.
They die, but in the dying they will finally discover life.
This doesn’t happen to everybody.
Even in the face of death some folks refuse to let go of all the garbage
that comes between them and others. Some
refuse to let go and let God, to let God love them with a love that will not
let them go. Some remain bitter, angry,
judgmental, and unforgiving to their last fleeting breath. They die without ever truly living.
Despite some early heresies based on Greek philosophies that would have
exalted the soul while demeaning the body, the Christian view – the biblical
view – the Hebraic view - of humanity is that a person is body, mind, and spirit. One part cannot be separated from
another. Come resurrection day those of
us in Christ will not be disembodied spirits floating around in heaven. We will be who we’ve always been: whole
people, possessing body, mind, and spirit.
The only difference will be that we will be totally redeemed and
renewed: physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Those earliest Christians intuitively understood this. They were aware of the interconnectedness of
body, mind, and spirit. Prayers for
healing included prayers of confession because those folks knew that the sins
that darken the human soul also do damage to the minds and body.
Sins not confessed, dark moral secrets not dealt with, and hurts left
unforgiven can cause us and those we love all kinds of emotional damage. They can destroy even the most intimate of
relationships, including our relationship with God. Such things also have a way of destroying our
bodies from inside out. We’re learning
more every day about the affect that emotional – and spiritual - illnesses have
on the human immune system.
Those early Christians knew something else that we modern Christians,
especially in Western Europe and
And then there are those
ding-dongs on television who give Christian healing a bad name. Many are charlatans, in it only for a fast
buck. Their so-called healing services
more closely resemble circus acts and magic shows than they do the worship of God. When we try to talk about real worship
services of healing and wholeness we often meet resistance because of the
damage these charlatans have done.
James and the other early apostles took this stuff seriously. They had seen people healed and cured through
prayer. They had watched Jesus heal
people by touching them. Coming from a
Jewish background they knew that the laying on of hands and anointing with oil
were very much part of their religious heritage. They knew how powerful an instrument prayer
could be when it was used faithfully and in the name of Jesus. The acts of healing they had observed and
taken part in weren’t magic shows. They
were valid acts of a mighty God working through the power of the Holy Spirit.
James was writing to remind some of those earliest Christians of this
truth. Reading again from today’s text, this
time as it’s paraphrased in The Message, “Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing.
Are you sick? Call the church
leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the
Master. Believing-prayer will heal you,
and Jesus will put you on your feet. And
if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven – healed inside and out.”
James was big on prayer: prayers of supplication, intercession, and
thanksgiving. He was also big on prayers
of confession. He knew that Christians
have to be prayerfully accountable to one another. Confession really is good for the soul – and
the mind and body. He was aware of how
powerful prayer could be, especially the prayer of, quoting from The Message
again, “a person living right with
God.”
He also knew how important it was for Christians to be accountable to
one another. In the words of Paul’s
Letter to the Galatians, “My friends, if
anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should
restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.”
Along with praying for and with one another and confessing our sins
to one another we have to be careful not to let people slip away into
ungodliness. As Foy Valentine puts it in
his commentary on today’s text, “At the
very heart of life and work in the church is the restoration of the fallen...”
That’s why James wrote these final verses in his letter, again from The
Message: “… if you know people who
have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued
precious lives from destruction and prevented a epidemic of wandering away from
God.”
[Just a brief exegetical note here: Eugene Peterson’s phrasing about
preventing an epidemic of people wandering away captures the true essence of
the more familiar wording about covering a multitude of sins.]
As part of our Communion service this morning each of you will be given
an opportunity to have the pastor and an elder pray with you and then anoint
you with oil. There’s no magic in the
oil anymore than there’s any magic in the bread and wine of Communion. The only power at work is God’s power. The grace or healing we experience at the
Lord’s Table or as we’re anointed with oil comes to us only in the name of
Jesus Christ. That is one of the
mysteries of our faith that we cannot totally explain in rational terms. But mystery is not the same as magic.
More than anything else this morning we’ll be involved in the process
of discerning the Body of Christ, of knowing and understanding one another as
parts of that Body. We will be eating
and drinking together. We will be
lifting one another up in prayer. We
will experience the true meaning of Christian unity as we rejoice with those
who rejoice and hurt with those who hurt.
Prior to that we will have sung our hymns and praise songs. We will have individually, in silence, and
then together, out loud, confessed our sins and heard Scriptural words of
pardon. We will have passed the peace,
greeting those who are here while taking notice of those who are absent.
Later we will leave this place with a song in our hearts. As we go may we take with us a sense of inner
healing and peace. May we be healthier
in body, mind, and spirit for having been here.
As we go we will also take with us our own personal burdens, our
concerns for the world, our concerns for one another, and our concerns for the
church universal as well as for this church particular we call Grace. Let us remember that we bear none of those burdens
and concerns alone. By the power of the
Holy Spirit our Lord Jesus Christ is with us.
We are available to one another.
And as we face whatever it is that life might throw at us between now
and next Sunday, let us remember that before we do anything else to address
those things, our first act should always be that powerful and effective
instrument of our faith that we call prayer.
Amen.