So That You May Be Healed

Sunday, October 1st, 2006
Proper 21 B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
James 5:13-20

13 Are 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.

Candidate Conference, February, 1985. I’d received the invitation in November of ’84. Being invited to the Candidate Conference was the second step in the process to becoming a Missionary Journeyman. The first was submitting an application. The third was being accepted as a Journeyman in training. The last was being commissioned upon completion of the 5 & ½ week training required for the program. From there you were individually scheduled to depart for your country of service.

All those who were invited to Candidate Conference did not go on to training. Along with 2 or 3 other candidates, I was invited to fly into Richmond earlier than the rest of the folks in the group. There were some issues that needed to be explored with each of us that, while they did not preclude our being considered for the conference, they did need to be addressed with each of us individually. Once we had each had our meetings with the consultants regarding those, the rest of the crew arrived, and the conference began in earnest. Over the two and a half days of the conference, we were presented with the various requests that had been submitted by missions around the world for journeyman positions, we sat through review and orientation sessions about what to expect to find as journeymen, and discussions about the expectations that might arise on OUR part as co-missioners on the field.

My roommates during the conference were Tom Blackaby and Phil Cain. Tom is from Canada. If you’ve heard of Henry Blackaby, Tom is one of his two sons. He and his family moved back to Norway and are serving a church there as Pastor. Phil is currently serving with his wife as a missionary in the republic of Niger, in West Africa.

At the time, however, none of us were certain where we would end up, if anywhere.

The conference was a pretty intense time; a full schedule of meetings along with a full plate of decisions to make in a fairly short time. It’s a combination that makes for not-too-restful sleep – if any—while there. Tom and I overslept that first morning. Phil was up and out of the room before either one of us stirred, and when we DID stir, it was to realize that we barely had time to throw some clothes on and walk to the mission board – we were staying at the Holiday Inn that was just a few blocks from the board.

As we walked side by side that morning, I remember a comment Tom made. Neither one of us had a chance to shower or do anything other than plaster our hair down with water and get dressed and brush our teeth. But we DID have time to throw on some cologne. Tom’s comment was ‘cologne covers a multitude of sins.’

To be honest, that was the first memory that popped into my head when I read this morning’s passage.

What is it that can truly cover “a multitude of sins?” If you’ll notice a recurring theme in the epistle of James, aside from the idea of putting faith into action, there is an underlying theme of community – of being a follower of Christ within the context of a community – a family – of faith.

That can be difficult at times. At best, we can find ourselves surrounded by caring, loving, affirming brothers and sisters who rejoice and pray with you, or cry with you as the situation warrants.

Friday evening we held a baptism of one of our Hispanic friends, and there was group of about 15 people here to share in the service. A small group, yes, but nonetheless, a group that was willing to come out on a work night, since most of them work on Saturdays as well as Mondays through Fridays, to say to Alejandra that they rejoiced with her, and would pray with her, and would walk with her in the way of Jesus.

At worst, that faith community can turn, can alienate, can ostracize and belittle, and expel someone or a group who most needs redemption or community.

What James is laying out in these verses is a … telegraphed message about what to do when. If you’re sick, pray – with your brothers and sisters. If you are cheerful, you should sing songs of praise with your brothers and sisters. If you are sick, you should call the elders – the deacons and ministers of the church – your brothers and sisters – to come pray with you.

The passage takes an interesting turn, I think, at verse 16.

“16Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

The context, having just been discussing the issues of illness, and anointing with oil and prayers that are effective for the healing of the sick would seem to indicate that what James was talking about was the physical healing in response to prayer.

But there is a critical shift in the impetus, the motivation, for prayer and confession in verse 16. What is the opening phrase? ‘Confess your sins to one another,’ that seems to be step one.

Step 2 is ‘pray for one another’, and step three is … not really a step so much as a result: ‘so that you may be healed’.

I hope we’ve grown to know each other enough to understand that I don’t hold a mechanistic view of scripture, of prayer, of action and response. I don’t believe the Bible teaches that “if you do A, B and C in that order you’ll end up with result D.” I am much more prone to view the action of God in humankind as one that honors intentions of the heart as much, if not more so, than outward acts – but not separating the two, that it is revealed as we are more willing to be obedient to God’s commands for our lives, and that they will manifest themselves in ways totally unexpected – from unexpected sources as well as in unexpected circumstances. God enjoys a good surprise as much as any of us.

But the heart of this passage speaks to what it means to be in community. This is the last in this series from James that we will be studying, and it caps off a month of studying what being part of a community of faith --- a community that ‘acts out’ its faith – means.

So what did James mean when he said ‘confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed’?

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Could we really take James’ words to heart, and actually walk up to each other and confess our sins to each other? Are we really willing to be that vulnerable, that open, that frank with each other?

Is there trust among the members of this congregation – enough so that there can be that degree of openness between us? It bears noting that verse 12, the verse immediately prior to this morning’s reading, contains the fairly well known entreaty to ‘let your yes be yes, and your no be no’ that we might be more familiar with than we realize.

James’ call is to one of openness and honesty. He doesn’t tell us it’s the easiest way. It’s not. His assessment of the human condition overall let’s us know that he is well aware that it can at times be the most difficult path to take. And yet, he calls us to it in the name of Christ.

And can we really understand the call of the gospel as anything else? Nowhere do we find Christ glossing over sinful conditions and broken relationships in order to make a situation more … palatable, or easy to walk away from. Jesus always faced the reality of a situation head-on. We are, as his disciples, to do likewise.

Christ calls us to model his behavior. He was firm, and gentle. Loving, and pointed. Honest and unblinking. He held people accountable for their actions and their words.

If we are in this relationship with each other, as a family of faith, holding each other both up in prayer and … to the task … and we’ve all come into the relationship understanding that to be the case, then we know what we ‘signed up for’ so to speak.

If we do not see the relationship that way, then we will need to reexamine what it means to be church, to be family, to be the body of Christ.

Let’s pray.