Sunday,
September 30, 2012
Ordinary
26/Pentecost 18B
Jerusalem
Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA
Text:
James 5:13-20
13Are any among you
suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of
praise. 14Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of
the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of
the Lord. 15The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord
will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. 16Therefore
confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be
healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. 17Elijah
was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and
for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18Then
he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest. 19My
brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought
back by another, 20you should know that whoever brings back a sinner
from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a
multitude of sins.
So this morning is our last foray into James’ letter
to his congregation… or congregations… we’ve gotten a clear sense over the last
few weeks (at least I HOPE we have)
of how practical James is in approaching his folks with the ‘how’ of living the
life of a follower of Christ.
This morning’s passage, for US anyway, may seem to
hit a little off center on first read. There is just enough in it that goes
against our western, science-based worldview that it seems a little too … ‘out
there’ … too … faith-healy and supernatural for us to feel completely
comfortable with it.
I would invite us to set aside the specifics and
look at what James is encouraging his folks to do in the broader sense of the
word.
Going verse by verse: he goes through a series of
situations and answers them with the appropriate responses.
Are you suffering? Pray. Are you happy? Sing! Are
you sick? Ask for the elders – in our context, these would be our deacons – and
have them come and pray and anoint you with oil. He then goes into a commentary on that specific topic. But
there is an interesting twist to it: after his initial comment, he goes on to
say “and anyone who has committed sins will be
forgiven.” He is categorizing illness and sin together, it would seem.
It gives us insight into our current view of various
sins as forms of addictive illnesses. If we were to approach our sins in that
fashion – not ONLY as allowing our wills to cave in to the temptations we might
be faced with at any given moment, but as symptoms of an illness … it fills out
another aspect of what it means to be slaves to sin, doesn’t it?
He follows with a word of encouragement: the prayers
of the righteous are powerful and effective (availeth much, is what we might be replaying in our minds from the
King James), and BECAUSE they are
powerful and effective, all the more reason to follow Elijah’s example and pray
for a miracle. The encouragement is in the fact that by this time, Elijah the
prophet has reached mythic proportions in the pantheon of Hebrew prophets, an
almost-unattainable level of faithfulness and obedience to God. But James, in
just a few words, brings him down to the same level as the folks that he’s
writing to: ‘Elijah was a human being like us,’ and
then he goes on to present exactly how ‘powerful and effective’ Elijah’s
prayers WERE.
His final entreaty in the passage speaks clearly to
what I think has been his intent all along:
19My brothers and
sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by
another, 20you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from
wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of
sins.
What is the image we get here? It is of brothers and
sisters caring enough about each other to reach out to each other and reconnect
– to remain in relationship – to maybe
instruct, persuade, or point out – however you want to phrase it – when someone
you love and care about is … misdirected? Straying? Lost? Confused? James’
wording here is comfortable for us if we’ve grown up speaking Christianese, but probably not so much
if we’ve not – or if we are trying to communicate this idea to someone who was not
raised speaking the same language of this subculture we live in.
To put it in terms that (hopefully) don’t immediately
set off judgment alarms in the ears of those with whom we are trying to
communicate simply due to the word choice:
‘Brothers and sisters, if someone you love and care about is
doing things that are ultimately self-destructive and unhealthy and chaotic for
their spirit and their life, and through your persuasion or presence in their
lives they begin to get their life back on track, back in the direction of
wholeness and integration, back towards acknowledging that God is God and they
are not, and that Christ is Lord and that he is MORE than just savior, you will
have saved them from a death that they would have experienced long before their
heart stopped beating, and you will have put them on track to correct wrongs
that were going far beyond simply themselves.
That last, I think, is the greater task – the much
greater task. To be able to relate not simply to each other – that is hopefully
understood to be a baseline for us – but to also be able to relate to those who
are either on the periphery of our community or who are part of the greater
community that surrounds us – we have that designation on our prayer list, if
you’ve noticed – people who are not necessarily directly connected to
us but of whom we are still aware and for whom we still care
and most importantly, whom we still love.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at
Emmerton?
This is where our faithful responses come into play.
Whatever situation we find ourselves in – whether we are suffering, or
cheerful, sick, troubled, angry, whatever it is – because we have
this family that we are a part of, this community of faith, this band of
pilgrims with whom we’ve chosen to travel this voyage alongside, all of these
experiences are experiences that we do not face alone, that we do not bear in
solitude, that we are actually CALLED to share in the life of the community.
Insofar as we allow the walls that society tells us
to build between us to stand, it is to that degree that we are diminishing the
Kingdom’s ability to shine through in the way we live together. So James’
admonition is, just like Christ’s, to make this way of living so compellingly
brilliant (in the ‘shiny’ sense of the word) that it would draw people in to
that central light of Christ just as it has drawn us in.
Let’s pray.